DDR SDRAM support in the TM5400 shows that Transmeta was looking forward when they designed the Crusoe. It will be a while though before DDR SDRAM hits the mobile market.

But there is something missing from the Crusoe specifications. Three letters: AGP. The integrated northbridge does not support AGP, only PCI.

While at the moment there are many different PCI mobile graphics chipsets available, six months from now the selection will be smaller and the speeds will most likely be slower than new AGP designs. The video market has been leaving PCI for a while now and Transmeta has locked the first generation Crusoe chips into a dying, low-performance video interface.

What makes the Crusoe so different from the competition is that it runs the entire x86 instruction set, including MMX, in software.

Through a technique that Transmeta calls Code Morphing, but everyone else calls emulation, the Crusoe "morphs" plain old x86 software into Crusoe native instructions. Transmeta claims that, through the use of complex software optimizations, hardware buffers and registers specifically made for the task at hand, the Crusoe is able to run x86 software quickly and transparently.

On a side note, Linus Torvalds, famed creator of the first Linux operating system, worked on the code morphing software.