If you’ve kept a close eye on the technology space of late, you probably know that this is perhaps one of the most interesting times for processors in many years. After a number of stagnant generations, Intel has started competing again; AMD’s Ryzen chips are still pretty solid; ARM is where a lot of the innovation is happening; and RISC-V looks like it’s going to be the coolest thing in the world in about a decade. But none of these chips, honestly, can hold a candle to the interestingness of the chip I’m going to tell you about today. It didn’t set the world ablaze; in fact, it was designed not to. In the end, it was used in relatively minor systems, like internet appliances and palmtops. But technologically, it bridged the gap between two camps—RISC and CISC. And that’s what makes it interesting. Today’s Tedium looks back at the Transmeta Crusoe, perhaps the most interesting processor to ever exist.
The Crusoe was absolutely fascinating, and the most bonkers what if?-scenario with the Crusoe is that in theory, there was nothing preventing the Crusoe’s software translation layer from emulating something other than x86. If this technology had evolved and received far more funding and success, we could’ve had a vastly different processor and ISA landscape today.
This, along with the “OLPC,” is one of two subjects that were once all the rage in tech news circles, but seemed to just disappear. Crusoe, especially, seemed to have a huge amount of promise, or at least hype, then it seems like everyone just woke up and collectively forgot it existed one day – I don’t remember it ever being used in any shipping products, outside of one laptop from (IIRC) Sharp.
I remember at least two Sharp laptops using Transmeta processors, the Sharp MM10 and MM20. I think the MM10 was on Crusoe and then the MM20 was an Efficeon or something like that. But it doesn’t matter now.
Transmeta was a hype engine in the late 90s. Everyone wanted to know what they were up to. They had hired Linus Torvalds and were super quiet about their work. Something was going on. It didn’t take long for the industry to figure out it was a processor. And since we were still in the make it faster/make it smaller/make it hotter/make it use less power game for CPUs, this seemed interesting.
But Transmeta announced itself to the world 5 years after founding and it was right before the dot com bust. They went public with the Crusoe in early 2000. Then they had supply chain problems. There were recalls, there were cancelled deals, cancelled products, and so on. On top of all that, once you actually used a system with a Crusoe, it was underwhelming. Better for a laptop at the time? Maybe. But it was still slower than everything we had. No one really cared about battery life back then like we do now. It was speed. And the Crusoe was just not cutting it.
Just a few years too early for the netbook boom. I remember there was some major buzz in how secretive the company was, combined with the hiring of Linus. The technology was great at least in principle, and the layers of designing hardware for a flexible software/firmware platform was a breath of fresh air considering how overweight and underwhelming the Itanium was turning out to be.
Someone built supercomputer with them, though.
https://www.theregister.com/2002/05/20/transmeta_blades_power_landmark_supercomputer/
And I remember to read that it optimized floating point code quite wel.l
The Transmetas were quite good at long running code… bad at short running code and self modifying code.
Here’s to all the tech companies that tried to do something “hard’ knowing that they didn’t have a chance from the start.
(to entrepreneurs, you need to have more than just tech experience)
I once had a couple of these tablets, with Crusoe CPUs: https://www.amazon.com/Compaq-TC1000T-Tablet-470045-149-Transmeta/dp/B00007FCVI
beautiful, unique looking gadgets, but holy moly the performance was terrible compared to a Pentium III at the same clockspeed.
Edit: I’d kinda love to do a case mod on one of those though, if it’s even possible.
I once had a look under the hood of an arcade pinball machine featuring lots of canned videos corresponding to the gameplay. It had a trasmeta CPU and I asked myself what is this thing? Haha. It’s the only time I ever saw one of these.
I have a Fujitsu P2120, Compaq TC1000 and HP think client that has an efficieon in it… (I’ve actually ran Haiku on that in the past).
They should have mentioned nVidia Denver CPU, which was also doing some on the fly dynamic recompilation, 10 – 15 years after Transmeta.
Rumors said that nVidia wanted at first to make an x86 compatible CPU, but they couldn’t settle the legal aspect, and had to switch to ARM.
“there was nothing preventing the Crusoe’s software translation layer from emulating something other than x86” – yes, there was. After all these years I can’t recall the details, but I had an interesting discussion back then with someone in the know, and though the translation layer translated Intel’s complex instructions into smaller units, those smaller units were still very much geared towards x86.