After four and a half years, Transmeta has finally lifted its veil of secrecy and spilled the beans. Or rather the chips. There are two, both built to run x86 code at high clock speeds while delivering unprecedented battery mileage. The larger of the two (TM5400) is targeted to the notebook and subnotebook Windows laptop market. The smaller one (TM3120) is targeted to the new Mobile Internet Appliance market.
According to Transmeta, that market wants three things: real Web browsing, real portability and long battery life. The market, they say, demands Linux, and they are more than equipped to give it to them. "We have a certain amount of expertise with the Linux OS," says Transmeta co-founder and Chairman David Ditzel. Transmeta famously the employer of Linus Torvalds, who created and continues to guide development of the popular operating system.
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Ditzel, one of the originators of the RISC (reduced instruction set computer) concept and the leader for many years of Sun's SPARC effort, co-founded Transmeta to tackle the challenges of mobile computing. What Transmeta finally delivered not only meets that challenge, but perhaps achieves some RISC ideals as well.
In effect, Transmeta designed a whole new breed of x86 microprocessor — one idealized for mobile computing. The Transmeta architecture is utterly unlike anything coming out of Intel or its standard competitors. At its core is a powerful VLIW (very long instruction word) engine, surrounded by a "code morphing" sofware layer that translates x86 instructions and intelligently caches them while observing the needs of the system's applications, so the chip optimizes execution of translated instructions at extremely high speeds. By replacing millions of transistors with software, the Transmeta chip is small, fast, efficient and extremely undemanding in the way it consumes electricity.
The result is a breakthrough into a computer market territory that has remained closed in the absence of designs that feature the kind of long battery life that customers now expect of portable radios, telephones and other popular hand-held devices. Transmeta calls this the Mobile Internet Computing market. This is where devices will provide the kind of rich and colorful Web experience provided by a laptop computer, but in extremely light and portable form factors. The most mobile end of that market, Transmeta believes, requires the Linux operating system.
What they call Mobile Linux is a native x86 version small enough to fit into ROM with enough room left for a browser and other software components. Mobile Linux runs on the smaller and cooler of the two chips. And the system is upgradable. "There is an advantage to the Transmeta apporach that allows you to upgrade the software over time," says Linley Gwennap, a microprocessor analyst with The Linley Group.
The big question is: will the market buy it? Gwennap thinks chances are good. "The fundamental problem is the simple fact that microprocessors are consuming more and more power every generation. And Dave Ditzel is right: we're headed for a hundred watt chip on the desktop. So this isn't a problem in the mobile area. This kind of technology, which gets away from the complexities of doing everything in the chip, and shifing more of it into software, makes a lot of sense. It solves a lot of big problems," he says.