Transmeta Processors - Are they good?

[lowtechguy]

Hi

Curiously the transmeta processors seem to be completely lacking any mention in anandtech website or forums.

Anyway, I would like some skinny on these processors because I am thinking of getting notebook based on these processors.

Any ideas about compatibility, performance, architectures?

 

[adlep]

Hmm, they have very interesting architecture, but you will be better off with the mobile version of PIII....
Anyhow here is a link for ya although they are kinnda biased..

 

[Thor86]

The Fujitsu P-series Lifebook which uses the Transmeta Crusoe 800mhz chip. I use WinXP and Win2k Pro on it, and everything works from apps/office suites/games. It isn't the fastest system out there, but it sure is compact and battery charge lasts 3.5 hours. And with an extender battery, you can run this thing for over 10+ hours without a power hookup.

Most laptops equipped with Intels usually don't have the battery capacity that I was looking for, or the compact size.

 

[gaidin123]

Thor86,

I own that exact laptop and love it. It is definitely on the slow side, however the current version that Fujitsu sells comes with an 866Mhz Crusoe, and 256MB of RAM standard to help with the speed some. The size and weight of the laptop are amazing. It has come in very useful at my job and doesn't break my back lugging it around.

lowtechguy, The Transmeta CPUs really seem to be a viable solution for subnotebooks and other extremely low power applications. The battery life on the Fujitsu P-series notebooks is amazing if you've ever used a Dell laptop. A P3-M CPU will prove to be a noticeably higher performance notebook processor, but it still won't beat the battery life of a Pseries notebook with the high capacity battery.

There's not much to say other than the Transmeta's are x86 instruction set compatible and can be adapted to run any (supposedly) CPU instruction set with their code morphing hardware which, incidentally, sucks 16MB of your system RAM at all times kind of like shared video memory on some systems.

Gaidin