Transmeta’s Crusoe
Ravi Madapati
Faculty Member
Icfai Knowledge Center
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Crusoe’s advantages
“Microprocessor designers need to adopt fresh techniques and new kinds
of metrics to align their work with the coming post-desktop era. Requirements
for compact, low-power, highly reliable embedded devices and techniques will
drive the next generation of processor designs.”
- John Hennessey, professor of
electrical engineering
& computer science at the Stanford University[1]
Crusoe promised many benefits:
Use in lighter computersWith only a few hours of battery life,
and weight in the 7 to 10 pound category, more people kept their laptops
in one place instead of moving them around. In case of lightweight
laptops, battery life was even shorter, and sometimes the heat coming off
the bottom of the machine was too much to bear. This defeated the purpose
of buying a lighter machine in the first place. Crusoe was designed to be
the solution to such problems. With the industry’s highest
Performance/Watt ratio, the Crusoe processor ran everyday office
applications for up to 11 hours. And with the lowest thermal design power
in the industry, computer manufacturers could use Crusoe in notebooks that
were just one inch thick or less.. |
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Transmeta believed that existing mobile processors were not
designed from scratch to deliver the low power really necessary to be a true
mobile solution. A mobile computer had to be as light and thin as possible and
cool while delivering good battery life. Crusoe powered machines would be 3.5
lbs or less and thinner than an inch. And with Crusoe’s lower power
requirements and higher performance, designers had many more choices for their
next generation. They could keep the same dimensions and increase screen size.
Hardware-only processors, such as those of Intel, regardless of whether they
were desktop or mobile chips, had a very serious power consumption problem,
which Crusoe aimed at overcoming.
Longer battery life
Conventional processors incorporated more and more transistors and more
electricity was required to operate these increasingly complex designs. Crusoe
contained fewer power hungry transistors than conventional processors and thus
required less electricity to run. Crusoe also utilized Transmeta’s LongRun
power management technology. LongRun was an adaptive technology that determined
the requirements for the processor and delivered just enough performance to
satisfy the workload at hand, without wasting any more energy that was
necessary. This was incorporated into Crusoe’s Code Morphing software layer and
improved battery-life by delivering high performance when needed, and
conserving power when demand on the processor was low.
UpgradeableIn the design of the first Crusoe processor,
it was noted that a key advantage to the software-based architecture was the
ability to perform upgrades to the processor. Software upgrades allowed
Transmeta to design and bring to market processors in roughly half the time it
took for the standard hardware processors. Instead of having to release a new
chip to fix bugs in silicon, which took weeks for the new chip to come back,
Transmeta could make most of its fixes in software which could be recompiled
and loaded into a system the same day.
Market Acceptance Mobile Processor market
[1]
www.transmeta.com.
© Icfai Press. Global CEO •
December 2003, All Rights
Reserved.
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