Transmeta Corporation, founded in 1995 and based in Santa Clara, California, recently unveiled two new CPUs. Intended to take the portable world by storm, these CPUs are the x86 capable Crusoe TM3120 and TM5400 VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processors.
We've been asked by our readers to give our thoughts about the Crusoe, but until recently, we had no direct experience. At this year's Platform 2000, we took a good long look at the Crusoe, watched presentations by Transmeta engineers and asked plenty of questions. Here's what we think so far:
What's so great about the Crusoe? It packs an extremely modern and different architecture from the norm yet it can run any x86 application, it sips power through its efficient LongRun power management system and it runs at up to 700MHz. Here are the details:
There are two models of Crusoe processors:
TM3120
The TM3120 is intended for mobile client and web pad devices running Mobile Linux. It can run from 333MHz to 400MHz and resides on a 72mm^2 die. It features 64KB of L1 instruction cache and 32KB of L1 data cache, and supports 66MHz to 133MHz SDRAM. The TM3120 is currently in production.
