JC heeft wat lekkere info over de Transmeta TM5400, afkomstig uit een artikel van Andreas Stiller. Deze befaamde journalist van c't kreeg de kans om een bezoekje te brengen aan Transmeta, al waar hij o.a. kreeg te zien hoe de geëmuleerde north bridge van de Transmeta TM5400 zonder booten van nieuwe Code Morphing Software werd voorzien. Verder schrijft hij dat de Transmeta TM5400 op 700MHz qua performance vergelijkbaar is met een PIII 500. De prestaties zijn afhankelijk van de effectiviteit waarmee x86 instructies door de code morphing software geoptimaliseerd kunnen worden:
The real news comes from a second article: A report from Transmeta headquarters. The famous Andreas Stiller visited them (as the first European journalist and the first one to be allowed to stay there for a whole day).He got some news about LongRun (233-600Mhz in 5 steps, minimal distance is 33Mhz and 1.1-1.6V core voltage). TM5400 consumes 6W at most. The processor includes a north bridge which is partly BX-compatible. The north-bridge is also emulated. And it has interfaces for SDRAM and DDR SDRAM (2*133). This emulated north-bridge is an advantage. When Andreas was there, they encountered a small bug in the northbridge and uploaded a new Code Morphing Software (CMS) ON A RUNNING SYSTEM (he implies that the system was not rebooted or something to make the new CMS run).
Transmeta Chief Ditzel said he still has good contacts whith Boris Babaian (Elbrus E2K Designer) who was at transmetas HQ just a week before Andreas was there. He says, that the architecture of both processors differs a lot.
TM5400 will be produced in IBM-CMOS8s-copper and will be the first cpu to be produced that way.
Andreas brought performance info: TM5400 at 700Mhz is about as fast as P3-500, but not in Ziff-Davis-Winstone. The problem there is, that the benchmark often 'touches' routines just once. Hence, the dynamical optimization does not play a role there. ZD-labs promised to Ditzel, that the next version of Winbench will contain a more realistic distribution of recalled parts of code"