Transmeta

[TroyW]

Anyone had any experience with the Transmeta CPUs? They sure sounded like an interesting design.

[paul]

Sony made a small notebook with one of these at one time. I also had stocks in that company and lost my shirt so am trying to forget about them!

[TroyW]

Sony made a small notebook with one of these at one time. I also had stocks in that company and lost my shirt so am trying to forget about them!

D'oh! Sorry to hear it. From what I've read they aure sounded like an interesting design, would love to play around with one and see what is and isn't possible with one, could be great for emulation purposes I'd think.

[carlsson]

Transmeta was in a big hype because Linus Torvalds headed (?) the company. Dunno if the were worth all the coverage though, it may have hurt them more than they gained.

[TroyW]

Maybe so, but I always thought it had lots of potential for emulation purposes, if it was possible to change the instruction translator to translate to something other then x86 code - say 68k, 6502, or maybe even PPC. Or even better, if some, most or even all of an emulator could have been coded into the translator, for example the core of UAE for seamless, fast Amiga emulation. I don't know how feasible this would be, but it would have been VERY cool if it was possible, I don't know enough about those CPUs to know if it's possible or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta#Technology

[carlsson]

It appears they still sell licenses to use the intellectual properties, so any manufacturer interested in such uses you describe could invest in it. However it seems they were mostly focused on low power use processors, the code morphing was a way to achieve that.

While it is far from my field of experience, aren't custom reprogramable computers likely to execute code from foreign instruction sets made through FPGA, i.e. a hardware definition to make it work like a specific CPU etc? The Transmeta technology may be fine, but it would only be able to emulate a processor, not the other chips found in any computer you're trying to mimic. The big coolness is if during execution one could swap to another instruction set and then back. This appears to have been something T were aiming at first, but perhaps multiple cores of different processors aren't commercially hot. Unless I'm mistaken, other manufacturers (Sun?) have experimented with that as well.

[barythrin]

I think the last thing I heard from them was when Intel and AMD had just released 64-bit processors to the market, they said they're currently working on a 256bit processor. (Think I saw it on slashdot but am not finding the article). Beyond that I'm not sure what they're up to right now besides some embedded use.

[carlsson]

Heh. From a layman's point of view, it sounds like when kids brag about whose dad is the strongest or richest. Weren't there 128 bit architectures already in the 1990's, and in that case is anyone - including state of the art servers - using them today? Now when the clock frequency finally is getten over with, is it time for a new battle of bitness?

[TroyW]

While it is far from my field of experience, aren't custom reprogramable computers likely to execute code from foreign instruction sets made through FPGA, i.e. a hardware definition to make it work like a specific CPU etc? The Transmeta technology may be fine, but it would only be able to emulate a processor, not the other chips found in any computer you're trying to mimic. The big coolness is if during execution one could swap to another instruction set and then back. This appears to have been something T were aiming at first, but perhaps multiple cores of different processors aren't commercially hot. Unless I'm mistaken, other manufacturers (Sun?) have experimented with that as well.

You're probably right, however even just a super-fast hardware emulation of a CPU could be done in such a way that it wouldn't matter so much that the rest of the hardware was emulated in software, which could be done I'm sure.

And yes, if instruction sets could be changed on the fly, it would be a real blast to play around with!