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Transmeta

Build Your Own Crusoe-Powered Computer 226

Posted by timothy from the lower-your-electric-bills dept.
jonmason00 writes "Just checked the Transmeta webpage, and discovered that they are now offering a Crusoe TM5800 System Development Kit. It's a bit expensive ($995) and you gotta register before you can buy one, but they need your support." How about an Astro development kit instead? :)
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Build Your Own Crusoe-Powered Computer More

Build Your Own Crusoe-Powered Computer

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  • "they need your support" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by greygent ( 523713 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:17PM (#4911454) Homepage
    Transmeta is a fucking business for God's sake, not Greenpeace.

    They came up with a crappy business plan at the wrong time, and natural selection is taking care of it. Why try screwing the process up?
    • I think what the original poster meant was that readers who want an innovative, Linux-assosciated chip manufacturer to succeed should do what they can to buy Transmeta products, and this is just one opportunity.

      Otherwise I guess we just have to accept AMD/Intel's offerings.
      • Intel has donated code (and money) to the FSF and Red Hat (and other distro's). Hell, they even financeed the BeOS x86 port!

        That's a fuckload more than transmeta has done for linux. (Hiring Linus was a marketing move and little more).

        Call it flamebait. Personally, I wished the transmeta had succeeded. The idea was (and is) incredible. But they're basically just an expensive, low-speed celeron. wank-wank.

        • Transmeta financed thier own Linux distribution, Midori [linux.com] And contributed touchscreen, handwriting and power management functions in the Linux community. Likewise employing Linus and giving him time to still develop Linux is awfully nice.

    • Here's why (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Compact Dick ( 518888 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:22PM (#4911503) Homepage

      Intel and AMD have both signed on to Microsoft's Palladium program. We need a chip maker who hasn't succumbed to this yet.

      A crappy marketing strategy is no reason to write off an innovative technology [and yes, for once I believe the word is used rightly here.] The lower power consumption specs don't hurt either.
      • And have they promised not to sign on?

        Because if they havent done that, nothing is stopping them from signing on when they get successful.

      • Re:Here's why (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MisterFancypants ( 615129 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:39PM (#4911659)
        Intel and AMD have both signed on to Microsoft's Palladium program. We need a chip maker who hasn't succumbed to this yet.

        That's a great theory, but meaningless. In various interviews David Ditzel has been quoted as saying that Transmeta's chips would be in a unique position for Palladium because the Code Morphing layer would allow them to implement the security features without having to change their designs since that CMS isn't accessible to normal system software and thus is hack-proof-enough to meet the Palladium specs. Not exactly the kind of thing you'd hear from someone who is going to make a stand against Palladium.

        I'm pretty positive Transmeta WILL implement Palladium if it is required for future Windows releases. They haven't said they won't, they just haven't said they will. You assume that because Linus works there, they will decline, but business reality will make them accept it just as AMD did. How many laptops do you think are sold for the Linux market compared to the Windows marker? Transmeta is in deep enough trouble without cutting out 90% of their potential market in the future by thumbing their nose at Windows/MS.

        • Be positive (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Compact Dick ( 518888 )

          Yes, Ditzel would want to show Transmeta as pandering to the Windows market - after all, how can a HW manufacturer stay in business if it doesn't?

          But remember: there will be a fast-growing market for non-DRMed CPUs. If Transmeta play their cards right [get better marketing and business managers, dammit!], they can show the PHBs of the world why it is a bad idea to invest in hardware that they do not have full control over.

          Thanks for the informative post.
      • If Microsoft makes an OS that requires Palladium support from the processor, any chip company whose main segment is PC processors will make processors that support it. This includes Transmeta and anyone else.

        Remember, companies do not do what they think is "right", they do whatever makes or helps make money. That includes employing Linus -- the only reason they do it is because they think it is a good R&D investment.

        Low power consumption is nice, but adequate performance is more important, and innovative technology without good marketing is worthless.
      • Intel and AMD have both signed on to Microsoft's Palladium program. We need a chip maker who hasn't succumbed to this yet.

        How about looking to China and the yet-to-be-released Dragon Processor? Considering how China has made a few nose-snubs at Microsoft (Red Flag Linux and Chinux come to mind), they may decide to avoid the idea of Palladium altogether.

        Then again, there may be enough computing power out there on the market -- we can just get what we need and stop buying until Palladium dies. It shouldn't be here for a few years, right?
    • Well, I've just logged on for the first time in nearly a year, and what's the first thing I see? That's right, the parent comment being modded as a troll for making a reasonable and reasonably intelligent comment.

      past lost!
    • Didn't Cruesoes ship sink and he was stranded on a tropical isle? (BaBumP!)

  • They need my support? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tgd ( 2822 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:18PM (#4911463)
    Sorry, this might be an unpopular view because Linus works there, and all, but no company needs my support if they've got a product I find useful for a price that is competitive with other companies, and I won't waste my money supporting someone else's unsucessful ideas, just because they've got cool technology or cool employees.

    • Amen, this is ridiculous! Given that I can get a mini-itx board with a 800mhz CPU for a hundred and twenty bucks, why on earth would I buy one of these? I could have a cluster of those for the price of one of these.

      I did look at this price, laughed, and moved on with my life. Besides who needs one of these on the desktop anyway, it's a CPU dramatically unsuited for such use.

    • Re:They need my support? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PhotoGuy ( 189467 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:29PM (#4911578) Homepage
      Sorry, this might be an unpopular view because Linus works there, and all, but no company needs my support if they've got a product I find useful for a price that is competitive with other companies, and I won't waste my money supporting someone else's unsucessful ideas, just because they've got cool technology or cool employees.
      Well, as I understand it, TransMeta has products that are lower powered and run cooler than Intel's, which isn't just fluff, and $995 for a development board is pretty reasonable. (Not for a production model, but development kids are usually pricey). Seems intruiging to me.
      • It's cheaper than intel's development boards, relatively slow xscale boards were upwards of two grand from official distributors. Ouch. Their bigger chips get really outrageous :P Motorola's used to be really cheap (a couple hundred bucks or whatnot) but have been going up considerably lately.

  • Support? (Score:4, Funny)

    by All Names Have Been ( 629775 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:18PM (#4911466)
    ...they need your support...

    Great .. Geek corporate welfare.
    • > ...they need your support...

      Great .. Geek corporate welfare.

      Actually, the building is starting to fall apart, and about a dozen geeks are needed to hold the ceiling up. Anybody else interested?

  • Alternatives (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SteweyGriffin ( 634046 )
    Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.

    Transmeta had a great goal when they started four years ago to reduce power use in their chips and allow for code-morphing, but it's now 2002 and mobile Intel and AMD chips are faster and use less power. And don't even get started on desktop CPU comparison...

    • Re:Alternatives (Score:3, Insightful)

      by inode_buddha ( 576844 )
      Allow me to play "devil's advocate" in this thread, it seems so one-sided so far. Not that I have RTFA about Transmeta since like Jan 2001...

      "...it's now 2002 and mobile Intel and AMD chips are faster and use less power. And don't even get started on desktop CPU comparison..."

      Point 1:
      Er, *NOW* you're going to worry about your electric bill? Last I checked, the Crusoe 5xxx series didn't even require CPU fans.

      Point 2:
      Since when does faster == better, as opposed to being more efficient?

      Point 3:
      Since when were Transmeta chips specifically aimed at the desktop market, as opposed to ie blade servers, thin clients, and embedded devices?

      Just wondering.
      • "...it's now 2002 and mobile Intel and AMD chips are faster and use less power. And don't even get started on desktop CPU comparison..."

        Point 1:
        Er, *NOW* you're going to worry about your electric bill? Last I checked, the Crusoe 5xxx series didn't even require CPU fans.

        I picked up a mini-itx board with a 533mhz fanless last spring for under $100USD shipped.

        It included LAN, sound, USB, video (vga, svideo, and rca), serial, printer, ps/2 mouse and keyboard, standard ATX power supply, and a PCI port. As a bonus, it uses dirt cheap PC-133 sdram as well.

        Did I mention it only uses 2.8 watts? Availavle months ago?

        Now that is hardware I can screw around with. Car PC, box for playing DVD's in the house, random controllers that can use a serial port (wicked grin). If I want to spend a grand on some hardware kit, I have to ask my wife or sneak it in part by part...

    • Re:Alternatives (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Daniel Phillips ( 238627 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @11:08PM (#4913403)
      Or, build your own Intel- or AMD-based computer that's cheaper, faster, and uses less power.

      Not according to the guys who know what they're talking about. [lanl.gov]

      Your AMD or Intel machine will not get anything close to the mips/watt ratio that the Transmeta does. The LANL people go on to conclude that the Transmeta is cheaper in the long run as well, because of power (including cooling) and space savings. Faster, I'll grant you, but one out of three is pretty poor batting, certainly not worth a moderation of 5.

      For a cluster, the faster argument goes out the window as well, because the performance equation comes down to mips/watt, mips/cubic foot and mips/$$$, in all of which Transmeta leads AMD and Intel.

      Now I don't know about you, but I find the monolithic, nuclear reactor core kind of box is getting less and less interesting as time goes by, and what I really want is a box full of much more efficient processors, all dirt-cheap of course. I'll admit that that there's no way for the typical home user to get into this kind of system for a price that competes with a single, Athlon or P4, but that's this year. Check again next year.

  • They don't need my support (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MisterFancypants ( 615129 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:22PM (#4911506)
    They need to create a product that I feel is worth buying. That is what businesses do. Just because Linus works for them doesn't mean they have any reason to exist. If they can't compete on the merits of their products, then let them die.

    And, just for the record, this product isn't one I will be buying. It is way overpriced for what you are getting. A comparable barebones motherboard + CPU based on Intel or AMD could be had for an order of magnitude less money without requiring any kind of signup deal.

  • Yes Linus works there but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sirtimbly ( 528760 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:23PM (#4911516)
    It's not our responsibility to keep the company afloat. I'm all about supporting software projects that obviously serve the open source movement, but a business faces risks when playing in the processor arena. I am happy to pay money for projects like the free blender foundation. Transmeta is responsible for getting their processors put into retail products, we are not responsible for donations.

  • Yeah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by delta407 ( 518868 ) <slashdot.lerfjhax@com> on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:23PM (#4911521) Homepage
    They need our support, guys, let's rack up huge bandwidth bills and see if we can set their web server on fire!

    Nothing like a good ol' slashdotting to bring a business back in the black.

  • Why? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by I Am The Owl ( 531076 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:25PM (#4911539) Homepage Journal
    That's ludicrous. I could go out and buy an Athlon XP or even a Pentium IV for half that price, and get twice the performance or better. Why the hell would anyone buy this?

    I bet even the mobile versions of the aforementioned processors are cheaper and faster.

    • Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by greenrom ( 576281 )
      I've seen several comments posted like this, so I thought I'd point out that this is NOT some off-the-shelf motherboard targeted at the consumer market. This motherboard is a reference design for people who are designing their own platform around their processor. When was the last time you got a full set of schematics with your motherboard (and no, I don't just mean the jumper settings)? If you're a laptop manufacturer, $995 is cheap for a working reference design you can modify a little bit to fit your specific needs.
      • So, um pardon me for being dumb, but what exactly is different about this "reference" board than a typical ATX board? (Yes, you get schematics, but that doesn't make the board any different!)

        It seems if I wanted to build my own laptop from scratch, I'd need a whole lot more than this board to play with (like a whole bin of laptop parts and some method of integrating them or building the missing pieces to fit it all together).

        Further, how do I program the chip itself? The crusoe code morphing software sits on a ROM chip...does the board come with a way to reprogram that sucker?

        • Re:Why? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Jennifer E. Elaan ( 463827 )
          Reference boards are generally either oversimplified or overfeatured, to give the system designer a quick and dirty overview of how the chip works.

          Funny you mention building a laptop from scratch, I'm currently looking at doing just that. To actually do the build, yes, you need the parts and some PCB facilities and a good solder station or a vapor-phase soldering system.

          But to design them, you can just take the reference board into schematic capture, netlist to a pcb and move the parts around into your new form factor. Often you will hardly need a redesign.

          The chip itself is almost certainly (I haven't worked with the Crusoe, but FPGA's do this) have an external EEPROM or flash ROM to store the configuration information (the code-morph ROM) in. They provide this in binary form, you stick it on the ROM. The system reads it on boot.

          They have NOT released specs on code-morph, so you'd be on your own for reverse-engineering it, though.

        • In a word, everything!

          A development board is designed for use by engineers working out how to drive the chip. Typically there'll be a few peripherals (ADCs, DACs, etc), a serial port or similar as a programming and debugging interface (and the debugging interface itself will be something you wouldn't get on a laptop), some RAM onboard, all that kind of thing.

          As an analogy, it's the difference between a bare engine clamped to a dynamometer, and an engine fitted in a car. You can work out how to get your power source working, but there's a whole load of other stuff that needs to go around it in order to build something useful.

          Grab.
    • Transmeta's chips run cool. Not a big deal to many people who grew up on vacuum cleaners inside their computers, but many Mac aficionados know how much having a very quiet computer can mean.

      There's a lot of applications that just don't *need* a ton of CPU time, but longevity and the ability to not have failure-prone and noisy fans in a device is worthwhile.

      I don't see why this is so bad. If I get a laptop in the near future (think I finally settled on a new desktop instead this year), it's going to be a Lifebook. Why? The things *get* a ton of battery life (17 hrs spec, 10 hrs under load).

  • Off-topic rant (Score:4, Insightful)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:26PM (#4911549) Journal
    What's with this "you gotta register"?

    Why can't businesses be content with getting my money?

    Oh, because they're not selling commodities anymore, they're turning their customers into commodities to be sold.

    Shall I supply my blood type and a DNA sample and a piss test and fingerprints in addition to my social security number and home phone and mother's maiden name?'

    Get out of my life! Sell me your product and go away! I am not a number, and I don't need to be in your database!

    • Re:Off-topic rant (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Uh, you have to register because you're purchasing a development system and they want you in the developer program. This isn't a product, it's an early release development platform to enable OEM's and software developers to have early access and detect bugs in both Transmeta's stuff, and your stuff.
      • Uh, you have to register because you're purchasing a development system and they want you in the developer program. This isn't a product, it's an early release development platform to enable OEM's and software developers to have early access and detect bugs in both Transmeta's stuff, and your stuff.

        And if they asked nicely, I'd probably participate. But don't insist I do beta testing for your product (or "early release"); conscription doesn't put a smile on my face.
    • Shall I supply my blood type and a DNA sample and a piss test and fingerprints in addition to my social security number and home phone and mother's maiden name?'

      Also you need to provide a stool sample
  • Does anyone have any comparisons so I can see how a Crusoe MHz compares with a PIII, P4, or AMD MHz?

    • Re:benchmarks? (Score:5, Funny)

      by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @07:13PM (#4911967) Homepage Journal
      1 Intel MHz = 1 AMD MHz = 1 Crusoe MHz.

      Performance is another thing, but one million cycles per second is the same thing in every friggin supercluster. Sorry to burst your bubble of different MHz measurements, but I guess truth always hertz.

      • Funny, there are several things wrong with this statement:

        Multiple clocking. Some chips are clocked to rising edge, some to falling edge, and some to both. Clocking to both doubles the EFFECTIVE clock speed.

        Differently specced clocks. The AMD Elan I'm working with now can use either 33.000MHz or 33.333MHz as its base clock chip, leading to slight variations in the final frequency, but that's rounding error.

        Split clock, anyone? Horrible to work with if you've done any LSI or VLSI, but running the chip on multiple multiples/divisors of the base clock is actually relatively common.

        Finally, asynchronous designs, lol, although neither of the systems mentioned are asynchronous. Clockspeed is no longer a true concept anymore.

  • or use a mini-itx for $100 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by horster ( 516139 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:26PM (#4911555)
    or you could just use via's mini-itx multimedia platform for around $100 (board, cpu, network, sound & video).

    mini-itx.com [mini-itx.com]

    • Agreed 1000% (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bhsx ( 458600 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @07:27PM (#4912077)
      Sort of OT; but why isn't the EPIA series, especially the 6000 model with 800MHz C3 not gaining more attention? It runs fanless, has TV-out on the board, can take 1GB of ram and has everything you could need on the board, throw it into [caseoutlet.com]
      one of these which happens to have an external PS and a front USB port and was pretty much designed with the EPIA 6000 in mind. I've harped on it before, but why isn't this the preferred RYO PVR platform?
      The form factor fits right in with your vcr, and the case comes with a pci-riser card to fit that AMD AWIP card for TV-in, and excellent 3D. Nearly silent and the price is right (the Mobo/Case costs around $195). You could make a fantastic PVR/PC-compatible-gaming-consolesque system for around $500. $195 +$100(AIW) +$75(80GB eide hdd) +$60(1GB pc133 ram) +70(DVD/CD-RW comb0 drive). Add it up. And that's a lot of overkill on the ram, but hey, it's cheap. So why isn't this a story? Because it's not coming from Intel, AMD, or Transmeta? All of this "digital convergeance" is leading to more and more embedded arenas, if we can make a box like that at retail prices, think of what we could prototype for our own foray into the embedded market...

      • Re:Agreed 1000% (Score:3, Interesting)

        by horster ( 516139 )
        totally agree - every time there is a stupid quiet pc or case moding story on slashdot I post to mini-itx.com. don't really know why people arent' more pysched, this is the board everyone claims they've been wanting - cheap, quiet, low power, mid range performance. perfect for web and multimedia.
      • One reason: they're slow. An 800mhz C3 is NOT as fast as an 800mhz P3 or Athlon. An 800mhz processor really is acceptable for most work or even as a TV companion, but C3's are barely up to 500mhz standards.

        If Transmeta could sell processor/board combinations as cheaply as VIA C3s, they'd murder the Mini-ITX market. Unfortunately, hobbyists and home-builders are not a priority to them.
      • It's not a story because we already all know. I was going to buy a mini-itx system but I got an old athlon 700 instead because it turned out that no one made a mini-itx with dual ethernet at the time. Someone may now, but I wouldn't know.

        See I think the whole damned purpose of mini itx is blown when you have to stick PCI cards on there to get things done with them. At that point you might as well just get a baby atx or whatever the smallest of those are called. They're only a couple inches bigger than mini itx and they cost about the same amount with a gigahertz celeron on them.

        I would pay $200 for a 1ghz mini-itx board - a small processor fan is okay, I can always replace it with a peltier junction and a (fairly) big heat sink - That had the following interfaces: IDE, USB 2, IEEE1394, and the usual PC crap. I don't even need serial or parallel ports. I would further pay about $130 for one about the same speed with just ide and two ethernet interfaces, and the PC crap. At that point, if you want video capture, you can add the PCI riser and add something which does both video capture and hardware encoding, leaving your CPU free to play DVDs or something.

        But seriously, dual ethernet is a necessity. I hope someone has figured that one out by now, I'm too lazy to check :P

    • Yes, I plan on building my own little personal server based on the mini-itx platform. Use one of the CPU's that only require passive cooling. It's got one onboard nic - Outfit it with a second nic, some memory and a quiet harddisk like the Seagate Barracuda's, put it in a tiny case and you got yourself a really nice little *silent* server. The only problem is finding a good case. If someone started selling a system like this, I would most likely buy one as soon as I got the money.

  • Or I could try to find a job (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SteweyGriffin ( 634046 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:27PM (#4911562)
    Listen, I love Transmeta because they had some cool ideas when they started out. And hey, Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, works there as well. So their geek factor is really high and they seem like nice people as well (I visited back in 2000).

    I was just let-go by my company last Friday after 10 years of service. Bills are lying around waiting to be paid and I'm trying to send out resumes and find some work before my wife and kid leave me. I love them to death and would probably "end it all" if I lost them.

    So why should I spend my meager (non-existant, now) salary to support a company? They're in a business, and the business of business involves profiting.

    If you can't profit, you lose the business. So Transmeta, enough with this puppy-eyed cutesy appeal to the geek masses for financial support. Many of us are unemployed as it is and risking losing our lives from insanity.
    • You seem to be addressing Transmeta with that last sentance... Remember, they're not the one that asked.
    • This is off topic, but I really hope that whole "wife and kid leave me" thing was just hyperbole... otherwise, you might want to think about how much your wife really values your marriage.
    • I was just let-go by my company last Friday...
      ...I have a large penis

      Have you considered working in porn? I've heard that porn generally isn't too negatively impacted in rough economic times because a guy's gotta wank when he's gotta wank, job or not.

    • Hey man, I feel for ya.

      I am in an area where technolody worker unemployment rate is about 40%(portland, OR), and I found a job in 2 weeks, so I thought I'd let you know what I did, I hope it helps.

      I printed up 100 resumes, went door to door in every tech sector and business park I could find
      wlaked into the door and said:
      "Hi, do you employee software engineers?"
      usually theyresponded with "yes, but we're not hiring"
      then I would say "not many people are, can I drop off a resume anyways?"
      "Sure"
      I spent 3 days handing out 75 resumes. They guy who called had just had a programmer quit, and like the fact that i am a "go getter" and hired me after a 15 minute interview, which too place 10 minutes after he called.

      I'm not sure what you do, but maybe you can give this a try. Good Luck.
    • Bills are lying around waiting to be paid and I'm trying to send out resumes and find some work before my wife and kid leave me

      And then the sig: I'm a slashdot subscriber, are you?

      Dude, I'd really reconsider that slashdot subscription if I was you. In these hard economic times, you should be looking at all the ads you can to save money for your family.
    • Are you developing a Crusoe based project? No? Then why would you need a DEVELOPMENT KIT? While I appreciate your problems, no one asked you specifically to support them.

      Now, if anyone is reading and is developing a low power x86-based solution, they might be encouraged to get this, because Crusoe is an elegant and expandable solution.

      Transmeta didn't appeal to the geek masses. They appealed to the embedded/laptop masses. And a $995 dev kit isn't expensive. It's cheap.

  • Not meant to replace your workstation (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BitHive ( 578094 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:29PM (#4911582) Homepage
    Yeah, it's stupid to say that a for-profit company needs our support, but this thing is not meant to be your next desktop machine. Transmeta knows you can get a barebones x86 box for much less with far greater performance--they're not as stupid as many of you would like to believe. They're selling a development kit, i.e. for someone wanting to prototype, say, a stereo component or set-top box for resale.
    • I do understand exactly what your saying... However... How is this any different than any other x86 barebones box in that respect?

      I mean, I understand they are trying to target the "non-desktop" but were exactly does paying $1000 for a development kit prevent someone from having to come up with a custom motherboard fab for a set-top or other embedded device? Where exactly is paying $1000 (and I really want to know this, there might be an answer) help you in writing code for embedded device on a processor that is suppose to be x86 compatible?

      I'm really missing the point here... But IMHO, it's more likely they are leveraging the geek market to help promote other mobo manufactures to build transmeta boards, so they can sell more chips in the long run..... And prolong the time it takes before they reach the fate that Cyrix did (bought out, low market share, nitch low-budjet/low-preformance x86 compatible chips).

      • Development kits separate the programming aspect of bringing something to market from the hardware aspect. If they want to maximize the power usage, they need to figure out how to use LongRun, and also how to use the northbridge aspect of the Crusoe processors.

        They will come up with a custom motherboard fab - they'll be developing it at the same time as the software.

        In addition, development kits usually include schematics and/or gerbers for the actual board itself, which means you get FAR more than a board - you get the DESIGN, which can save a LOT of time.

        In general people will just take the design, and strip off chips they don't need - hence the reason that so many PC boards you buy lack large portions of chips (that, and modularity).

        This is actually cheap for a reference design - look at the uCdimm from Arcturus Networks - the dev kit is $1500.
  • We in the Java world were creaming all over ourselves at this prospect.

    Why didn't they persue the embedded device executing bytecode natively path?

  • Too expensive yes, but also too big (Score:3, Insightful)

    by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:32PM (#4911598)
    I can see the attraction for a kit like this. For those of us who might want to put together some type of home theatre pc or car pc something _like_ this would be nice. With the low power/heat requirements, it would lend itself nicely to such uses. IF it were a lot smaller. It's just too big. Plus they are just competing with all the other microatx mb's out there. This is the feature set that I think would actually be attractive:

    - make it much smaller, all small as feasable, don't worry about making it a "standard" size

    - chuck the floppy/parallel, keep one serial for programming

    - add 2 firewire ports for camcorders/ipods

    - sell a 12v converter for car/boat apps

    - allow the sound/video to be upgradable somehow (logic on sodimm?) to allow upgrading.

    - of course, drop the price.

    If they had done these things, then I would be most interested since I have several projects that are begging for a formfactor smaller than microatx, but yet doesn't force me to use crap audio/video.

    Hell if you're going to go for a niche, then GO FOR THE NICHE, don't come out with a "me too" product that has very little to distinguish itself from the competition.
    • you do realise that it has 3 pci slots? i wonder what they are for.. maybe they have forbidden you to not use a vga card on those(say, ati r9000 pci) or soundcard..
      • you do realise that it has 3 pci slots

        I'm glad you mentioned that because I forgot to add them to my list:

        - remove the 3 pci slots

        For the formfactor and applications that I mentioned, a pci slot is worthless (actually, maybe one horizontal might work). I want this thing to be small, throwing in a big ole nvidia card with massive heat sink and fan isn't going to help the applications that I have in mind. That's why I said to give it expandability by sodimm based modules. small enough for you to upgrade and still keep the thing a minimum size. Better yet, allow some of the code morphing magic to do things like the audio, so I can "upgrade" without adding anything other than software (I'm dreaming now :)
    • Hell if you're going to go for a niche, then GO FOR THE NICHE, don't come out with a "me too" product that has very little to distinguish itself from the competition.

      It's a Development Kit. It's not intended for mass-market use. You're supposed to use the board to help you create real stuff. You stuffing it into some non-development work isn't its intended market so complaining about it is pointless.

      Now if Transmeta said this was a motherboard for non-development markets, then you would have a complaint.

      • It's a Development Kit. It's not intended for mass-market use. You're supposed to use the board to help you create real stuff.

        Right but it's a development kit that is designed with that form factor in mind. I don't see any other support on their site for taking what you've designed and being able to apply it to other form factors. After all, it reads like a software development kit, not a hardware one since there are no hardware hooks. Is there a replaceable flash or anything of the sort, nope. They want you to cram the thing into a case, not a beige case, but some sort of case and build a product around this board, so my complaints are far from pointless. What makes this board any different from the other MicroATX boards out there other than the fact that it has their processor?

        I stand by my contention that this board does not go far enough. It is NOT a "cpu platform development" board, it is a "system development" board to wrap the board in. Unless you saw something on their site that I didn't, if so, please point me to it, because like I said, I'd love to do some custom systems with it if they offer something other than a glorified microatx board.

  • Why bother? VIA has em beat (Score:5, Informative)

    by nweaver ( 113078 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:33PM (#4911613) Homepage

    If you want a small, low power platform, look at the latest from Via [viavpsd.com], which contains 933 MHz processor (C3), USB2, audio, video, TV, ethernet, 1x PCI, in a 17cmx17cm form-factor for $160 from Fry's [outpost.com].

    It definatly blows away that transmeta one: giving more functionality for a fraction of the cost. You can even get slower (~600 MHz) versions which are totally fanless.

    • C3 is a dog, but it doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)

      by X_Caffeine ( 451624 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @07:15PM (#4911988)
      Similar to the way that an Athlon 1600+ is faster than an older 1600mhz Tbird, the VIA C3 processors are nowhere near as fast as equivalently clocked Pentiums or Athlons. I'm highly skeptical that a 900mhz C3 is close to the performance of a 900mhz Crusoe, which by most accounts performs as you would expect a near-1ghz processor to do.

      But man, Transmeta has totally missed the boat by not making basic, affordable computers available to hobbyists. FlexATX and C3-driven Mini-ITX [mini-itx.com] boards are enjoying the kind of hobbyist popularity that helped put AMD on the map a few years ago. This $1000 "developer board" is too little, too late, and too much freakin' $$$!
      • The 800MHz C3 runs like a 266MHz P3 in some benchmarks I ran. I think on the EPIA-M, they did something with the memory that may improve performance beyond the simple increase in clock speed; so, I would expect the 933MHz C3 to come in like a 300-400MHz P3. I'd expect the 900MHz Crusoe to be somewhat faster, but not a whole lot.

        But for $160, including processor, the EPIA-M is an amazing deal, and it's fast enough for most day-to-day uses. Dollar for dollar, it's by far the best deal around. Those things should be in every school and business as workstations and desktop machines.

      • My 'main machine' is a VIA 866 with 256MB DDR. I do not play games and it is both quiet and fast enough to handle DSL. I originally bought it as a low-power firewall machine but it was just to good for that.
        Yep, I would love to test a Transmeta system, but Mobo+Processor are around $800 more expensive (ok, 5 times the price) and it is simply not worth it. Maybe this offer should have been available 2 years ago and at a sensible price, at the moment I see no reason to change.
        Now, for a fast machine, the AMD Hammer should be interesting. I am seriously thinking of getting one of them in 6 months.

    • Re:Why bother? VIA has em beat (Score:4, Insightful)

      by barawn ( 25691 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @10:42PM (#4913272) Homepage
      I doubt the Eden platform is actually lower power than the Crusoe platform. Running fanless simply means that the processor has a low power dissipation - that is, W/mm^2 - power per area. It doesn't necessarily mean that it actually uses low power.

      That, and the Crusoe devkit is basically designed for a laptop. You can't buy a charge controller/keyboard/touchpad interface for the Eden platform.

      Not to mention the fact that you get schematics, as well. For $995. That's cheap.

  • Support Soekris or Mini-ITX boards instead (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ksw2 ( 520093 ) <obeyeater&gmail,com> on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:33PM (#4911616) Homepage
    At around $200 US, the Soekris net4501 makes a wonderful platform for firewall/vpn development, and beefier boards are forthcoming (at 500 and 800 MHz) in the near future. http://www.soekris.com [soekris.com]

    Additionally, if you're looking for higher end right now, choose one of the many mini-itx configurations available. http://www.mini-itx.com [mini-itx.com] is a wonderful site based in the UK. Buy directly from them or use one of the vendors they recommend.

    Sorry Linus , but people developing for tiny platforms can't afford to spend an extra $400-$500 for a Transmeta solution.

  • Step 1) Hire high profile geek.
    Step 2) ????
    Step 3) Profit!

  • Politics at work (Score:1, Interesting)

    by obiedxss ( 241764 )
    It's very nice that there could be an alternative too Intel/AMD, but this product is simply to expensive.

    Transmeta is like the Green Party. In 2000, neither the presidential candidate from either of the two major parties was terribly attractive. Nader, on the other hand, had some good ideas. Then again, was it really worth voting for him? It was impossible for him to get elected.

    I voted for him...
  • http://www.savetransmeta.com

    http://www.savelinus.com

    http://www.helpcrusoesail.com

    Yesh. I think that charging $995 might be just a wee bit more tolerable. :P

    Hrm. Maybe we can get savekaryn.com to redirect funds to Transmeta. Hmm
    • I really liked the promise of the Crusoe. I thought it was very clever technology.

      The problem is that the marketing was terrible.

      Crusoes were targeted at laptops. Problem: In a world where I can buy a Celeron 1500 laptop for USD 1000 or less, you'd better do something to impress me if you wanted me to buy a Crusoe. You can make it cheap, which you didn't (the only Crusoe laptop I see locally sells for ~USD 1800). You can make it last a long time on the battery, but I can get similar battery life for less money by throwing an external battery on the back of said $1000 Celeron. You can make it perform well, but you didn't.

      Make it competitive, or make it cheap. Transmeta (or perhaps more likely those who made products out of Transmeta CPUs) chose neither.

      I was surprised you didn't see the Crusoe landing on the corporate desktop too. There are plenty of places with 300-400-500MHz machines that are adequate (because they don't feel the need to play games). I would think that a Crusoe-based box would be ideal for that sort of role (as a replacement for dead boxes, or to put analogous boxes on more desks)... with limited cooling requirements it would be quiet, not belch out tonnes of heat, and save maintenence hassles by removing moving parts (fans).

      I also assumed you'd get a lot more flexibility with the "morphing" technology than you actually did. When Transmeta made the necessary documentation to exploit this stuff hard to find, they cut off their nose to spite their face. Why doesn't that "new Amiga" someone promises every few years run on a Crusoe set to emulate a 400MHz 68060? Why don't you see one-off Crusoe boxes designed to simulate obscure and otherwise irreplacable hardware. Hell, why don't you see them set up for student projects at universities to emulate the architecture they want to use as a teaching tool?

      What did get exploited was that 'Web Pad' deal which never materialised. Now, we have this 'Tablet PC' thing... which will probably immediately bloat its way out of the Crusoe's performance range.

      I had hoped that someone would buy Transmeta and do something useful with the technology. Now, I hope that when Transmeta finishes circling the drain, the local dealers start dumping Crusoe laptops cheap. :)
  • Just 1 pc Reference board?

    Or a bunch of other goodies, tools to play with the codemorph twiddly-winks, or whatnot?

    I mean I get the difference between a reference/debug build of a machine vs a retail build, eg Debug X-box vs a Retail X-box.

    You have to get more than a half-assed MicroATX board with a Linus(tm) CPU on it, right?

    I'm trying to avoid the obvious 'bah i wont support blah blah' thing and understand exactly what you get for a g-note from these guys.

  • How about access to the cpu "core" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by binaryDigit ( 557647 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:41PM (#4911681)
    What would really be cool is if they had a kit that allowed one to right their own "code morphing" code on top of their vliw core. I'm sure someone is/has work/ed/ing on a jvm for it. But imagine a linux kernel on core. I know that stuff like this has been tried before and failed miserably, but hey, that's what stuff like OS is about, just doing and making it work, and saying "now isn't that cool".

    Or you could even come up with your own custom extensions to the x86 IS, implement game logic, whatever.
    • What would really be cool is if they had a kit that allowed one to right their own "code morphing" code on top of their vliw core

      I thought TMTA's whole point was that they could completely redesign the core to be, I dunno, really-freakin'-large-IW and no apps would break -- because they all used the code-morphing interface. Giving direct access to the VLIW core would defeat that.

      As I recall, NexGen (who was bought by AMD) did expose their pentium-class x86's RISC-like core. It had a register switch or something. Nobody I can recall made use of it, though.

      But as long as we're dreaming, I'd think bigger. Like Bochs with multiple front-end instruction sets.

      Also, I'd like a pony.

    • That's a good idea. (It would be an even better idea if Transmeta had some market share, but I digress.)

      One extension to the architecture that I'd like to see tried is better support for fast interprocess communication. I'd like to have the hardware support needed to do a context switch and set up some segment addressing for an interprocess call without going through the kernel. Basically, I want peer-to-peer call gates. IA-32 has a mechanism nobody uses called "call gates", which almost, but not quite, do something useful.

      This wouldn't benefit traditional operating systems much, but it would speed up MsgSend/MsgReceive in QNX (which is about 1us now) to the speed of a subroutine call. That would make true microkernel operating systems speed-competitive with monolithic kernels. Might even make the Hurd work.

  • I can see the hellstorm that is to be released... (Score:3, Funny)

    by SensitiveMale ( 155605 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @06:58PM (#4911838)
    by telling a group of linux users that they have to spend money.


    If there is any other user group that will try to squeeze each and every cycle out of an old 286 then I don't know of them.

  • This is just a developer kit (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @07:11PM (#4911948)
    I think most of you guys missed the point. This is not so much for you to build your home entertainment PC, or the next killer desktop machine. Quite rightly, an Intel/AMD/Via solution would be much more cost effective.

    This is here really for smaller manufacturers to have accesses to the technology needed to build their prototypes etc. You prototype your next device using these parts, and when ready to go mass market, you can strike a deal for the CPU's etc. at bulk or whatever.

    This is just a developer kit, it isnt supposed to be really cheap/competitive etc. The value stuff comes when you are buying in bulk later.

  • Might be worth it dor DRM avoidance (Score:3, Interesting)

    by vandan ( 151516 ) on Tuesday December 17, 2002 @08:00PM (#4912310) Homepage
    AMD and Intel are pushing for integrated DRM in all systems. Using Transmetta products might be a way of avoiding that - if enough people boycott AMD and Intel and are vocal about their reasons we might be able to get compulsory DRM at bay.
    However I did notice that they use an ATI video card. Bad move if you're wanting to use that under Linux. Their video cards are all tied up in patents. I have been trying for 18 months to get an answer on why ATI asked people to cease development of TV-out support on my Radeon. That was one of the reasons I bought it, and it WAS supported and worked well at the time. Now however it only works with 18-month old drivers that don't really sit well with X. Damned ATI. Oh and Damned nVidia also. Their driver lock my system every 20 mins without fail - the other reason I chose to buy a Radeon. Maybe I should just redirect my console to my canon bubblejet...

  • kernel.org & transmeta (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bigberk ( 547360 )

    Sure, I know they're a business. But they're going out of their way to support linux and that's something I'm not ashamed to support. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours as they say.

    $ host -t NS kernel.org
    kernel.org name server ns2.transmeta.com
    kernel.org name server zenii.linux.org.uk
    kernel.org name server ns.vger.kernel.org
    kernel.org name server ns1.kernel.org
    kernel.org name server ns1.transmeta.com
    kernel.org name server ns2.kernel.org

  • Why codemorph? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pitr256 ( 201315 )
    The more I read about the Crusoe chips, the more I start to think about how they should just drop the strict x86 compat, and start people developing directly for the core of the chip, in it's native tongue.

    The Crusoe is a chip that runs comparable to a similar Intel/AMD chip and yet does it all through software emulation. Imagine what it can do with it's straight instruction set! Developers could start programming applications that take advantage of this, but then if they required a backward compatible app that has been compiled for x86, then the chip could also run those too. A distro based on the "native" Crusoe instruction set, could run x86 compiled applications.

    Why stop there? If they are able to codemorph x86, why not PPC or ... make the Crusoe a 64 bit chip, and codemorph SPARC or MIPS.

    • Code morphing isn't the problem. They should be supporting other chips though as well, if they want the embedded market. Having ARM support would be a killer (IMHO) and emulating some of the low-power Motorola chips would also be a great deal. Doing Intel support was obviously to sell laptops and Windows machines and get more exposure.
  • ... if they want my support. I'd love to build a machine that uses less power and doesn't need a CPU fan; it'd be good for a router or a file server for my humble home office. I would use a Transmeta CPU in a heartbeat if it were available and relatively inexpensive. VIA [via.com.tw] actually offers some similar products; I used a CPU from their C3 line that advertises that it doesn't need a fan, but it isn't nearly as nifty as Transmeta's stuff. Anyway, why doesn't Transmeta start talks with competing motherboard manufacturers?

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