Another factor that makes this less than earth shattering, in my opinion, is
that the CPU typically only accounts for 20% of the total power budget of a
system. If you reduce the CPU power by 100% you have only reduced the
overall system power budget by 10%. In the interviews on zdnet the Transmeta
team talks about the fact that Transmeta is pushing oems to reduce power on
other fronts as well but since they don't have the capability for a system
on a chip they must rely on third party developments to tackle the overall
system power problem.
IMHO, it is a step in the right direction but far from a solution.
thanks,
-chris thompson
Work like you don't need the money.
Love like you've never been hurt.
Dance like nobody's watching.
Pray like there's no tomorrow.
-----Original Message-----
From: mccarty@reg16.admin.rochester.edu
[mailto:mccarty@reg16.admin.rochester.edu]On Behalf Of R. Paul McCarty
Sent: Thursday, January 20, 2000 10:06 AM
To: wear-hard@haven.org; wearable@cif.rochester.edu
Subject: Crusoe versus StrongArm, Super H, etc.
Everyone talks about how ground breaking the new Crusoe chip is. And, I
admit it has some impressive innovations and is a really strong
challenger to the mobile AMD/Intel processors, but how much of an
improvement is this technology over say the StrongARM or Super H chips
that have comparable performance/power ratios?
It seems like the only real advantage of Crusoe over StrongArm is the
fact that you can move existing desktop applications, and OSs directly
to the new chip from x86 architectures. Other low power chipsets require
alot of work to port an OS or application to the new chip, along with
writing a whole new set of drivers. I also suspect there are some memory
management and floating point performance issues that make the Crusoe
chip much more attractive for mobile computing then the other chips.
If full blown Windows, and Linux ran on StrongArm would this product
still be as exciting?
-Paul
--
R. Paul McCarty / rpmc@troi.cc.rochester.edu / x52059
317 Lattimore Hall, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627
Life is nothing if you're not obsessed. -Pecker
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