Transmeta Debuts Denser, Faster Crusoe Processors

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While upstart chip maker Transmeta has been making a lot of noise about its second-generation Efficeon X86-compatible processor, which was unveiled in October 2003, the company has not backed off on improving its first generation of Crusoe X86 processors. Today, Transmeta announced two new Crusoe chips that are aimed at low-power markets such as blade servers and thin clients, and which will seemingly compete against the Efficeons.

The new Crusoe chips are dubbed that TM5700 and TM5900, and they are kickers to the TM5800 that made its debut in June 2001 running at between 700 MHz and 800 MHz using a 130 nanometer process at its foundry partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Transmeta eventually cranked up the clock on the TM5800 to 1 GHz, but the Crusoe processor has been plagued by a lack of enthusiastic vendor support among the big players in the workstation and server markets, who are more interested in selling Pentium and Xeon solutions that customers are familiar with than taking many risks. Transmeta is pressing on with the innovation, and even though it killed off the TM6000 follow-on to the TM5000 series of chips, it jumped right to the Efficeon TM8000, which will be shipping soon, and continues to improve the TM5000 series. Eventually, as consumers want smaller PCs that don't burn a lot of electricity and create a lot of heat and as companies start reckoning the costs of servers that are woefully inefficient, Transmeta's ideas about low power computing will catch on. But it may have to wait a long time for efficient computing to go mainstream.

The TM5700 and TM5900 processors are based on the same Crusoe core that was used in the TM5600 (the first Transmeta chip that came out to much fanfare in January 2000) and the existing TM5800. These processors use a 128-bit VLIW (very long instruction word) processing technology that allows up to four 32-bit instructions to be processed per clock. (This VLIW approach is distinct from the multiple pipelines that Intel's X86 and various RISC processors use to make a chip process more than one instruction per clock cycle). The TM5700 and TM5900 chips run at up to 1 GHz and have on-chip integer and floating point units, 64 KB each of data and instruction L1 cache, and either 256 KB (TM5700) or 512 KB (TM5900) of on-chip L2 cache, a 64-bit DDR SDRAM main memory controller, and a 32-bit PCI controller. The TM5700 and TM5900 also differ from the TM5800 in that they include an on-chip northbridge, an I/O feature that is usually part of an external chipset. The TM5700 and TM5900 come in a 21mm by 21mm package, which is 50 percent smaller than the packaging on the 1 GHz TM5800.

The new Crusoes also have the LongRun power management power management technology that allows the processor to automatically adjust its voltage and clock speed to meet the needs of applications running on the chip rather than just running full-out like most other processors sold today do.

All of this means the same processing oomph takes up a lot less electricity and generates a lot less heat. The chips can, in fact, be used in fanless systems, much as VIA Technologies ' Eden X86-compatible processors can be. To that end, Transmeta will introduce a Mini-ITX form factor reference system board that will include a TM5900 processor and schematics, design guides, processor specs, device drivers, and other stuff that workstation and server makers need to build machines. The Mini-ITX form factor is considerably smaller than the current variants of the ATX form factor that are used in desktop PCs, workstations, and servers. Mini-ITX boards are being used for small footprint PCs and embedded devices.

The Crusoe TM5700 and TM5900 processors will be shipping in volume starting this month. Microsoft gave them a vague endorsement for its Windows Embedded variant of the Windows platform, and MontaVista Software, which peddles embedded Linux, also gave the new Crusoes its seal of approval. Wyse Technology, one of the dominant makers of thin clients, also said that it would be using the processor. None of the server or blade server makers said anything about it, and neither did laptop and notebook PC makers. This has always been a problem for Transmeta, which had Toshiba, Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu as its key partners early on, but which has not yet allowed it to become a volume player in even niches of the X86 processor market.

It's hard to say how much the TM5700s and TM5900s will help Transmeta break into the big time, but the Efficeon probably has a better shot at least for gigahertz hungry users who don't want slow PCs and servers. (Slow is a relative term, particularly when you consider how little of their raw processing power most customers actually use.) The Efficeon TM8000 processor has VLIW units that, at 256 bits, are twice as long as those used in the Crusoe chips, and that means they can processor up to eight 32-bit instructions per clock cycle. The Efficeons have an integrated DDR SDRAM memory controller, but can also support ECC main memory, something that is a requirement for servers. The Efficeon also has a larger 1 MB L2 cache on chip, and an integrated HyperTransport I/O interconnect that delivers up to 1.6 GB/sec of throughput (twelve times more bandwidth than the PCI interface on the Crusoe chip).

Clock for clock, the Efficeon will yield about twice the performance of Crusoe. The chips are made using the same 130 nanometer process from TSMC and will run at between 1 GHz and 1.3 GHz, with a power range of 5 watts to 14 watts. (A fanless notebook needs a processor that eats 7 watts or less.) Transmeta has chosen chip maker Fujitsu to help it move to a 90 nanometer process in the second half of this year that will allow it to jack up the clock speed to 2 GHz and still only consume 25 watts of power. In 2005, the Efficeons will move to a 65 nanometer process, and clock speeds could double yet again.

Hewlett-Packard is using the Efficeons in a modified ProLiant BL blade server that it is selling as a blade PC, and Sharp and Fujitsu have said they would use the chip as well. But thus far, server makers have by and large steered clear. But with HP already having booked order for 1 million seats for its blade PC prior to its launch at the end of 2003, Transmeta is probably still pretty pleased.