“Intel introduced six new chips for notebooks on Tuesday, not long after cutting prices on its mobile processors. The chipmaker, which slashed prices on its mobile Pentium 4 and Celeron chips on Sunday, launched a new flagship 2.4GHz Pentium 4-M chip for notebooks. The chipmaker also boosted the clock speed of its mobile Celeron processor, issuing a new 2GHz mobile Celeron.” Read more at ZDNet. On other CPU news, Transmeta is embedding security in its new chips.
“Transmeta’s new security technologies would provide interfaces to the Crusoe architecture that enable both runtime and secure storage of certificates, keys, and eventually, other confidential information.”
So basically, everything the music industry needs to make sure you can’t do what you want with your Crusoe based computer.
Seriously, this reeks of a thinly veiled guise for a hardware backed DRM architecture for the Crusoe.
>>>>Seriously, this reeks of a thinly veiled guise for a hardware backed DRM architecture for the Crusoe.
This has nothing to do with DRM.
All the transmeta chips runs on portable devices. When you lose your laptops and pda’s, you want your data to be encrypted. Adding the encryption functions inside the crusoe cpu is the most logical thing to do.
thats IBM’s logo, not Intel’s – what does IBM have to do with this?
Let’s face it; sooner or later all wintel-compatible systems will have this DRM-crap built into them; probably stopping them from running opensource-os’s, unless in emulation (vmware) or something.
So, Sun/SGI/Apple/… here I come. Too bad their hardware is so expensive
It is pretty cool though 
“This has nothing to do with DRM. All the transmeta chips runs on portable devices. When you lose your laptops and pda’s, you want your data to be encrypted. Adding the encryption functions inside the crusoe cpu is the most logical thing to do.”
No, it’s not the most logical thing to do. Implementing encryption in software would be the most logical thing to do for the situation you’re describing.
There isn’t any other logical reason for extensions such as these besides DRM.
I read nothing about DRM, only about disk access and encryption acceleration (that might also help compression and decompression, as it’s a similar process). The only sticking point I saw was secure hidden storage of confidential information (I expect/hope it’s the systems owners not a software supplier’s info.)
Anyway it’s just the philosophy behind transmeta (it’s quicker to do it in hardware, so if it’s used alot and used generally then do it in hardware), okay its not that flexible but it supplies for need for efficiency on certain proc.’s (in this case generally used encryption algorithms).
Dave
The general philosophy os Crusoe is it’s better to do it in software, because it’s cheaper and uses less electricity. Hence the whole code-morphing thing.