Transmeta Changes the Landscape

It looks like 2000 is shap­ing out to be a fas­ci­nat­ing year for the tech­nol­ogy space. The year kicked off with a bang when AOL announced it was acquir­ing Time-Warner, chang­ing the Inter­net land­scape by com­bin­ing .com with a .bam. Today, a sec­ond major land­scape change hap­pened in the com­puter indus­try, as Trans­meta, aka Sil­i­con Valley’s most secre­tive com­pany, announced what it had been work­ing on for the past few years.

Mor­ph­ing software

Many of the media seemed to miss the story, how­ever, treat­ing it as just another com­pany announc­ing a new com­puter chip. What they missed, largely, is the rev­o­lu­tion her­alded by Transmeta’s code mor­ph­ing soft­ware. What it does is trans­late X86 instruc­tion into Transmeta’s native code.

The rev­o­lu­tion behind this lies mainly in the fact that this archi­tec­ture could the­o­ret­i­cally allow machines run­ning Cru­soe (the Trans­meta line of chips) to act not only like x86 machines run­ning either Win­dows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, or Solaris for x86 but also run code designed for any other chip. All they would have to do is throw in a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the mor­ph­ing soft­ware on top of the chip (say, for exam­ple a G4 soft­ware layer) and run the OS run­ning on other machines.

Log­i­cally, what Trans­meta has done is sim­ply cre­ate the most ver­sa­tile chip in the indus­try, allow­ing it to morph into all the most pop­u­lar com­puter chips out there through soft­ware emulation.

And because the first trans­la­tion layer they built is the x86 one, it means that their chip can now power Win­dows and Linux boxes as well as any Intel chip.

In other words, what Trans­meta announced today is that they had built a chip that is what Sun is try­ing to build with the Java chip, and in the process they have cre­ated what is essen­tially a vir­tual machine that addresses directly the chip, com­pletely bypass­ing the OS.

Caching for bet­ter performance

Another inter­est­ing part of the announce­ment of an adap­tive algo­rithm in their chip set that caches the most often use instruc­tion sets. As a result, the per­for­mance of the chip is greatly increased because the Trans­meta soft­ware caches the infor­ma­tion that repeats itself. In the demo they gave at their press con­fer­ence, they showed how run­ning a DVD movie on a Pen­tium III proces­sor com­pared to run­ning the same movie with the same DVD reader on a Cru­soe chip. The dif­fer­ence was stun­ning. While on the Pen­tium III, the idle time drop from roughly 90% to roughly 50% for the dura­tion of their run­ning the appli­ca­tion, the Cru­soe chip first saw a spike to less than 50% for a cou­ple of min­utes and then went back into idle mode as all the nec­es­sary instruc­tions to run the DVD play­ers had been cached in memory.

The bot­tom line here is that they have essen­tially cre­ated an adap­tive multi-tasking envi­ron­ment on a chip.

Built-in power management

The other thing that was inter­est­ing was their approach to power man­age­ment. For starter, the Cru­soe chips do not call on all areas of a proces­sor all the time. Because of the adap­tive nature of their mem­ory caching sys­tem, they show a major per­for­mance increase at a lower con­sump­tion rate. Accord­ing to the Trans­meta web site,

When an appli­ca­tion doesn’t need peak proces­sor per­for­mance, the model TM5400 can save power by reduc­ing its clock speed and volt­age. Using Transmeta’s Lon­gRun power man­age­ment tech­nol­ogy, soft­ware con­tin­u­ously mon­i­tors the demands on the proces­sor, dynam­i­cally and smoothly adjust­ing the processor’s speed to exactly what is needed to run the application.

You prob­a­bly keep more than one appli­ca­tion open on your com­puter at a time (for exam­ple, as I’m writ­ing this, my email client is run­ning in the back­ground, as well as a few browser win­dows from which I’m get­ting infor­ma­tion) but most of those being in the back­ground, they should take major amounts of CPU. A Cru­soe enabled machine would real­ize that and reduce the volt­age con­sump­tion of those tasks, there­fore increase the bat­tery life on your com­puter (this is, of course, aimed at the Mobile mar­ket Trans­meta is going after).

On a reg­u­lar machine, the chip knows either how to turn a process on or off but not how to degrade it to lower power con­sump­tion. As a result, Trans­meta has built a bet­ter mousetrap.

Upgrade­able through the Internet?

Because the core of the chip resides in a soft­ware layer that sits above the hard­ware level, it is pos­si­ble to cre­ate a chip that is upgrade­able through the Inter­net. A few years ago, the first ROM-upgradeable modems came out, allow­ing users to move from a 28.8kbps modem to an 56k modem by just down­load­ing soft­ware. The­o­ret­i­cally, Cru­soe chips should be upgrade­able in much the same way, which makes for an inter­est­ing world where hard­ware and soft­ware become closer.

But why does Linus Tor­valds work there?

The ques­tion on the mind of hordes of Linux users was why would Linus work at a chip com­pany? Well, today, the answer was given. Along with the announce­ment of the new chip, Trans­meta announced Mobile Linux, a ver­sion of Linux designed for sys­tems with­out hard disks, such as Mobile Inter­net devices (for exam­ple, Web pads, palm­tops, etc…)

The prin­ci­pal enhance­ments for Mobile Linux will be in power man­age­ment and in the reduc­tion of the mem­ory foot­print. So that’s what Linus has been work­ing on all this time, as well as being part of the team that built the mor­phable soft­ware. All and all, one can say that it was really smart of them to add him to their ros­ter of tal­ent, as it will fire up the Linux com­mu­nity to develop for this new ver­sion of Linux (and yes, Mobile Linux will be open source).

Style change

In what may be a depar­ture from the industry’s play­book, Trans­meta decided to announce the prod­ucts they had on hand. Yes, the chips are avail­able today (they men­tioned that IBM would man­u­fac­ture some of them) and no, they won’t answer any ques­tions about the future. In other words, this is no vapor­ware but a very real set of prod­ucts. This could change the way com­pa­nies around the indus­try release their products.

The losers: Palm Com­put­ing, Sun, Intel, Motorola and AMD

All and all, this announce­ment changes the land­scape for a cou­ple of major play­ers. For starters, Palm Com­put­ing might find itself in the mid­dle of a very big bat­tle. Because of the low power con­sump­tion of the Cru­soe chips and the intro­duc­tion of Mobile Linux, it is now pos­si­ble to envi­sion Palm-sized devices that can run audio and video. This rep­re­sents a major threat to Palm Computing’s installed base.

Sec­ond among the losers today are the chip com­pa­nies. Because they can run the x86 set, Transmeta’s chips are a poten­tial replace­ment for Intel and AMD chips in the lap­top mar­ket. A lot of the prob­lems those chips have encoun­tered is that the higher the proces­sor speed, the hot­ter the chips run, and the larger the fans that need to be used to cool them. If Cru­soe holds up as well as they demoed, Trans­meta could cap­ture a major lead in the lap­top mar­ket. Add the mor­ph­ing soft­ware archi­tec­ture and Trans­meta could also become a com­peti­tor to chip mak­ers Sun and Motorola.

Sun is fur­ther hurt in the fact that this is a vir­tual chip that takes away from the con­cept of vir­tual machines that Sun pushed with Java. As a result, Sun’s hope of cov­er­ing the mar­ket with Java devices as well as their JINI-everywhere strat­egy may have to be rethought.

The win­ners: Linux, Microsoft, Consumers

Linux is a clear win­ner with the intro­duc­tion of Mobile Linux, which will strengthen Linux’s gain in the com­puter mar­ket by offer­ing it as an alter­na­tive to any other OS in the hand held market.

Microsoft, inter­est­ingly, also becomes a win­ner with this. With Intel mak­ing some moves to back alter­na­tive oper­at­ing sys­tems, Microsoft was find­ing itself in the dif­fi­cult posi­tion of being some­what sub­servient to its biggest ally. Yes, there’s AMD but Cru­soe is yet another com­peti­tor to Intel, which only strength­ens Microsoft’s posi­tion in deal­ing with the chip man­u­fac­turer. Also, Microsoft gains some advan­tage here because its Win­dows OS can now run at bet­ter per­for­mance lev­els on hand­held devices. Yes, it will have to bat­tle Mobile Linux but this could make the main Win­dows line (Win­dows 9x and 2000) an alter­na­tive plat­form in the portable device mar­ket, which means that Microsoft could now ditch their efforts on WinCE and still have a card in that new mar­ket if they want to.

Con­sumer also stand to win from this announce­ment as it her­alds a new age of mobil­ity. Soon, a lot of low pow­ered mobile devices will hit the mar­ket: Portable DVD play­ers and wire­less Inter­net devices now have more of a chance in the mar­ket­place since they won’t con­sume as much in bat­ter­ies. I think we’ll all be happy to see those new devices hit the market.

All and all, it was yet another day when a major announce­ment changed the com­puter land­scape. Since that’s two major announce­ments in as many weeks, I won­der what’s going to hap­pen next week.

Stay tuned!