Transmeta's Crusoe

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Authors: Ravi Madapati
Faculty Member
ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research).

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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 University⁶

Crusoe promised many benefits:

Use in lighter computers

With 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. 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.

Upgradeable
In 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.

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6] www.transmeta.com.