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

To: ComradeBrehznev who wrote (317)	11/13/2000 7:29:11 PM
From: Artslaw	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 421

That's a good deal for TMTA. I really think DVD's are a killer app for laptops. I am going to guess that one doesn't get much of a battery advantage playing DVDs on a Transmeta chip. When playing a DVD the processor, DRAM, video card RAM, CD-ROM drive, and LCD (probably the HD to some extent, too) are all going full bore. The CPU is only part of the equation. The comment in the article stating that a Transmeta portable "offers up to 8 hours of battery life" is far removed from the DVD paragraph. Maybe you get enough to watch Titantic or something. Just to keep a balance, I ran across this negative Transmeta story today (whith pretty much touches all the points previously belabored): upside.com Regards, Steve

To: ComradeBrehznev who wrote (317)	11/14/2000 7:52:57 PM
From: Ron Mayer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 421

DVD on Transmeta... ComradeBrehznev wrote: "Steve said: 'That [software dvd playback] is precisely the sort of application that would run poorly on a Transmeta, ......' check this out - on their low- end 533Mhz chip: '...InterVideo's WinDVD2000 ...special optimizations for the Crusoe ...full-frame rate DVD playback on Windows ME'" One article suggested that DVD is an ideal application for Transmeta processors, because the few instructions needed to be decoded for playing DVDs only need to be "morphed" once in the first few seconds of the movie, and for the rest of the two hour film the chip runs at peak efficiency because it's no longer spending cycles (and power) translating x86 code. Oh, and here's an article specifically talking about their ability to upgrade their code-morphing software in a way that helps DVD: zdnet.com "The new CMS [Code Morphing Software] 4.2 was demonstrated as being more efficient, allowing a TM5600 chip to run 33MHz slower than a version of the chip running CMS 4.1 on the same DVD movie. The CMS 4.2 demo also consumed about 1.3 watts of power on average, while the CMS 4.1 demo sucked up about 2.2 watts. "