At Linus’ Transmeta, Crusoe finds its Friday

2000-01-25

If the recent surge of interest in handheld computing devices is anything to go by, it looks likely that Transmeta have found the goose that will lay their golden eggs. According to a survey by analysts NPD Intelect, December retail sales of plamtops grew by 169% compared to the same period in 1998. What is more, this success was not confined to the cheaper end of the scale. Sima Vasa, vice president of technology products for NPD Intelect, was quoted on News.com as saying that "Consumers are willing to pay a high price for the total mobility of personal digital assistants," with the result that high-end devices were also seeing expanding sales. Overall, Palm was the winner, gaining an increasing share of the market.

All of this is pretty good news for Linus Torvalds’ new venture, Transmeta, which has barely been out of the news since it announced its Crusoe chip last week. Crusoe uses a technology known as Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW), which dramatically reduces the size of programs but requires software to prepare the instructions for the chip. This software-hardware combination is what is garnering the most interest: because it works in software, the code preparation or “code-morphing” also enables Intel instruction set to be used without fear of infringing Intel’s hardware based patents. Despite Transmeta’s clear targeting on Intel’s market share, analysts concur that the giant has little to fear just yet.

There have been many projects researching how instructions would be better structured and fed to processors, but so far none have reached mass-market appeal. Sometimes things work because the time is right – consider the take-off of the Palm Pilot following many failed attempts by the competition. In Torvalds’ case, it is his personality that is creating the wave that he rides – when he first announced his intentions, few could resist seeing what the demi-penguin could come up with next.

On the subject of Linux, it would appear that the little man has not forgotten his offspring. Several extensions to the Linux kernel have been made to support the Crusoe chip, and Transmeta are fully behind efforts to bring embedded Linux-based devices to the market. This could raise interesting issues of conflict of interest – should Linus remain responsible for what goes into the kernel? We shall leave this debate for another day.

Crusoe chips, to be manufactured by IBM, are currently running at around the 500MHz mark but there is a 700MHz version on the horizon. The first customer for the chip is Diamond Multimedia, already noted as trendsetters through their launch of the Rio MP3 player a year ago. Diamond will be using the first chips off the production lines in their forthcoming WebPad device. These chips are reputed to support Linux only, so it looks like this could be the first example of a Linux handheld.

Overall Crusoe will give technology a boost by showing that other architectures are viable and, indeed, prefereable when used inside devices. So – it’s good news for handhelds, good news for Palm, good news for Transmeta, and good news for Linux. So who is losing out? Well, all of these developments put the squeeze on any platform which is trying to get into the space. If press coverage is anything to go by, it looks like “Powered by Windows” may well become one of the forgotten taglines of early 2000.

(First published 25 January 2000)