Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

dfarq.homeip.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 156 posts

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#21

Post by mananaysiempre »

p_l wrote: post #19
pshirshov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't modern CPUs, essetially, dynamic translators from x86_64 instruction set into internal RISC-like intsruction sets?

Not to the same level. Crusoe was, in many ways, more classic CISC than x86 - except it's microcode was actually doing dynamic translation to internal ISA instead of operating like interpreter in old CISCs. x86 ISA had the funny advantage of being way closer to RISC than "beloved" CISC architectures of old like m68k or VAX. Many common instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchite…

> Many common [x86] instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchitecture

And then there are read-modify-write instructions, which on modern CPUs need two address-generation μops in addition to the load one, the store one, and the ALU one. So the underlying load-store architecture is very visible.

There’s also the part where we’ve trained ourselves out of using the more CISCy parts of x86 like ENTER, BOUND, or even LOOP, because they’ve been slow for ages, and thus they stay slow.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#23

Post by p_l »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #21
p_l wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to the same level. Crusoe was, in many ways, more classic CISC than x86 - except it's microcode was actually doing dynamic translation to internal ISA instead of operating like interpreter in old CISCs. x86 ISA had the funny advantage of being way closer to RISC than "beloved" CISC architectures of old like m68k or VAX. Many common instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchite…

> Many common [x86] instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchitecture And then there are read-modify-write instructions, which on modern CPUs need two address-generation μops in addition to the load one, the store one, and the ALU one. So the underlying load-store architecture is very visible. There’s also the part where we’ve trained ourselves out of using the more CISCy parts o…

Even many of the more complex instructions often can translate into surprisingly short sequences - all sorts of loop structures have now various kinds of optimizations including instruction fusion that probably would not be necessary if we didn't stop using higher level LOOP constructs ;-)

But for example REP MOVS now is fused into equivalent of using SSE load-stores (16 bytes) or even AVX-512 load stores (64 bytes).

And of course equivalent of LEA by using ModRM/SIB prefixes is pretty much free with it being AFAIK handled as pipeline step

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#24

Post by lproven »

scq wrote: post #4

One aspect of Transmeta not mentioned by this article is their "Code Morphing" technique used by the Crusoe and Efficeon processors. This was a low level piece of software similar to a JIT compiler that translated x86 instructions to the processor's native VLIW instruction set. Similar technology was developed later by Nvidia, which had licensed Transmeta's IP, for the Denver CPU cores used in the HTC Nexus 9 and the…

Code morphing was fascinating. I had no idea nVidia tried anything similar.

I always felt Transmeta could have carved out a small but sustained niche by offering even less-efficient "morphing" for other architectures, especially discontinued ones. 680x0, SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, PA-RISC... anything the vendors stopped developing hardware (or competitive hardware) for.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#25

Post by lproven »

Theodores wrote: post #11

I liked the Transmeta web page from before they launched. It was just bare HTML with no styling. It said: This page is not here yet. The product hype and lack of knowledge about what it was meant that nobody knew what to expect. In these hyped expectations, and with Torvalds on board, everyone expected that everything would be different. But it wasn't. A similar product launch was the Segway, where we went from this…

> I liked the Transmeta web page from before they launched. It was just bare HTML with no styling. It said: > > This page is not here yet.

I remember that fondly.

If you did view source there was a comment that said something like:

No, there are no hidden messages in the source code, either.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#27

Post by em-bee »

iszomer wrote: post #8
noelwelsh wrote: post #3

Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel? IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) research into dynamic inlining of compiled code, giving performance comparable to profile-guided optimization without the upfront work. It worked similarly to an inlining JIT compiler, except it was working with already compiled code. Very interesting approach and one…

I remember it being in one of Sony VAIO's product lines called the picturebook, for its small form factor and a swivel webcam.

hat was the first laptop i owned ;-) as a frequent traveler it was a very useful device.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#28

Post by organsnyder »

Tepix wrote: post #22

I had a pretty slick Toshiba Libretto L1 from Japan at the time - twice as wide as long, with a 1280x600 display. Its 600Mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU was pretty slow, unfortunately. Like a Celeron 333Mhz IIRC.

I used a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046 laptop at university. It had an 800Mhz Crusoe chip. IIRC it shipped with 256 MB of RAM, which I eventually upgraded to 384.

Somehow I managed to tolerate running Gentoo on it. Compiling X, OpenOffice, or Firefox were multi-day affairs. One thing that annoyed me was I could never get the graphics card (an ATI Rage 128 with 4 MB RAM, IIRC) working with acceleration under Linux, and that was when compositing window managers were gaining prevalence; I kept trying to get it working in the hope that it would take a bit of the load off of the struggling CPU.

Despite the bad performance, it worked really well for a college student: it was great for taking notes, and the batteries (extended main and optical drive bay) would easily last a full day of classes. It wouldn't run Eclipse very well, but most of my CS assignments were done using a text editor, anyways.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#29

Post by organsnyder »

drob518 wrote: post #15
rsynnott wrote: post #5

> But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms I'm not sure that that's really correct; they were very desktop-oriented.

Well, they ended up being mobile-oriented, but even that didn’t work. They were definitely not server-oriented and they really couldn’t compete at desktop. Honestly, while the tech was interesting, it wasn’t really solving a problem that anyone was struggling with.

> it wasn’t really solving a problem that anyone was struggling with

They did push the envelope on efficiency. My Crusoe-equipped laptop could go six hours on the stock battery (12+ on the extended batteries) back when most laptops struggled to get three.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#30

Post by SuperscalarMeme »

scq wrote: post #4

One aspect of Transmeta not mentioned by this article is their "Code Morphing" technique used by the Crusoe and Efficeon processors. This was a low level piece of software similar to a JIT compiler that translated x86 instructions to the processor's native VLIW instruction set. Similar technology was developed later by Nvidia, which had licensed Transmeta's IP, for the Denver CPU cores used in the HTC Nexus 9 and the…

So glad someone else also knew about this connection :) Details about Denver are pretty minimal, but this talk at Stanford is one of the most detailed I’ve been able to find for those interested. It’s fascinating stuff with lots of similarities to how Transmeta operated: https://youtu.be/oEuXA0_9feM?si=WXuBDzCXMM4_5YhA
Post reply on HN