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Technology Stocks : Transmeta (TMTA)-The Monster That Could Slay Intel -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: praguepivo who wrote (64)	1/20/2000 4:08:00 PM
From: phbolton	Respond to of 421

Read this; Transmeta's Crusoe by Jon "Hannibal" Stokes Almost 20 years ago, Transmeta CEO David Ditzel and his colleague, David Patterson, collaborated to coauthor the famous article, The Case for a Reduced Instruction Set Computer.ÿ In this article they argued that microprocessors were too large and complex and that by moving much of that complexity from the silicon into software they could increase performance and lower die size, power consumption, and cost.ÿÿ Today, 20 years later the RISC movement has changed the way that computer architecture is done...yet it seems that things are moving back the other way. Modern CPUs have hardware that performs on-the-fly optimization and reordering of code, branch prediction, and host of other tricks in order to squeeze out every last ounce of performance from an application.ÿ Sometime last year, Ditzel made a comment to the computing press that I've gotten a lot of mileage out of. I used it as an opener to my RISC vs. CISC piece, because it summed up how I felt about the current state of the microprocessor industry. After seeing yesterday's presentation on Transmeta's new Crusoe technology, I can see now that that quote was actually a little mini-preview of what Transmeta has been working on these past five years:ÿ "Today [in RISC] we have large design teams and long design cycles," he said. "The performance story is also much less clear now. The die sizes are no longer small. It just doesn't seem to make as much sense." The result is the current crop of complex RISC chips. "Superscalar and out-of-order execution are the biggest problem areas that have impeded performance [leaps]," Ditzel said. "The MIPS R10,000 and HP PA-8000 seem much more complex to me than today's standard CISC architecture, which is the Pentium II. So where is the advantage of RISC, if the chips aren't as simple anymore?" As Ditzel points out, modern CPUs are more complex, have more hardware, and perform more functions than their early RISC predecessors. All that hardware requires lots of power though, and the more power a CPU draws the hotter it gets. much more at arstechnica.com