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To: bobby is sleepless in seattle who wrote (79705)	1/20/2000 12:35:00 AM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 120523

IBM is the winner tomorrow. Transmeta Locking with IBM by Michelle Finley 1:40 p.m. 19.Jan.2000 PST Big Blue will have Crusoe inside. On the heels of Transmeta's long-awaited announcement about its super-sleek, super-powerful Crusoe chip and what it means, IBM immediately went into a 24-hour media blackout. But a company spokesperson acknowledged the long-rumored relationship between Transmeta and IBM, and confirmed that the company would be manufacturing the Crusoe chip. Read more Technology -- from Wired News Read more Business -- from Wired News Crusoe Chips Land on Intel Turf "All I can say, and I shouldn't even be saying this, is that people here have seen a working prototype and it does what Transmeta says it does," the official said. "We are looking forward to making this product available to the market." Another IBM official was too thrilled with the new technology to remain silent. "I've seen it, it works, and I'll be buying the first machine that rolls off the assembly line featuring it," he said. "We are talking about a laptop that can run all day off a single charge." The official confirmed that IBM is "in full production" with Crusoe at the Burlington, Vermont, facility. "There are two [chips]: the TM3120 has 108KB of cache, is manufactured on 0.22 micron, and consumes 1 watt of power, while the TM5400 has 400KB cache, is manufactured on 0.18 micron, and uses 1 watt of power. Both products use synchronous dynamic RAM." These chips will be marketed within the year, even though Intel --which produces the Pentium microprocessors -- has longstanding contracts with many major computer and mobile-device manufacturers. "Transmeta has accounts lined up already for these chips," the second IBM official said. "I can't announce who they are but you should expect to see notebooks powered by the 5400 by Q3 of this year." David Anderson of Anderson Technology Services, who provides mobile computing consulting for New York State government agencies, believes that the most significant part of the Transmeta announcement is its low power usage. "In real-life applications, if it really only draws 1 watt of power, then Transmeta has revolutionized the portable computing industry," Anderson said. "I'm interested to see whether the 'software' solution, which Transmeta CEO Dave Ditzel says will tune itself to the applications -- and is supposed to produce better performance and power conservation -- actually works smoothly or creates jitters in the overall CPU speed when the chip downshifts or gears up to its various performance modes." Anderson also expressed concern about how much RAM the Crusoe-chipped computer will take. "But if all they say shakes out to be true, and the performance is there, then we may be seeing the real portable machines at last," Anderson said. Anderson was less impressed by the constant hawking during the product announcement as being "100-percent Internet compatible." "What computer these days isn't?" he sneered. An analyst from IDC who requested anonymity, however, wasn't impressed after watching the launch. "Even after the smoking laptop display, and watching [Linus] Torvalds get beaten in Quake, I'm not clear on what Crusoe is offering that Intel's SpeedStep [announced Tuesday] isn't?" SpeedStep adjusts the processor to the demands of the machines' use and has already been implemented by all the major manufacturers. "I think that Transmeta handled this publicity stunt beautifully but the real news in power-saving technology is over at Intel, not Transmeta," she said.