From the 'Amiga Inc Partner' archive, Transmeta. Now a penny stock.

[asian1]

VLIW Curse

See Itanium & Itanium 2 CPU abandoned by HP, the original designer of Mercer / Itanium.

http://www.arcade-eu.info/overview/2004/itanium.html

>Transmeta Engineer - ask for License

What is the name and the title of this engineer?
Is he / she still work at Transmeta?

I HAVE asked for the license, and I got the above reply.

Perhaps Transmeta sales department did not understand their own product (?).

What is the comparison of between "code morphing" performance and the real 68K, Coldfire or PowerPC?

[bloodline]

asian1 wrote:
VLIW Curse

See Itanium & Itanium 2 CPU abandoned by HP, the original designer of Mercer / Itanium.

http://www.arcade-eu.info/overview/2004/itanium.html

My point exactly.

>Transmeta Engineer - ask for License

What is the name and the title of this engineer?
Is he / she still work at Transmeta?

I have no idea, this was 5 years ago at the launch of the Crusoe. I actually wrote to the Sales department, but it was an engineer who replied.

I HAVE asked for the license, and I got the above reply.

Perhaps Transmeta sales department did not understand their own product (?).

What is the comparison of between "code morphing" performance and the real 68K, Coldfire or PowerPC?

Acroding to the guy who replied, supporting any CPU architecture is easy, even different ones at the same time... performance is very dependant upon the quality of the Code Morphing "Emulator"... I would expect the maximum performance to be similar to that of their x86 code.

[EntilZha]

@ redrumloa

It's a bit far-fetched to blame the failure of Transmeta on Amiga, or why do you mention them as "Amiga, Inc partner archive" members ?

[redrumloa]

AFAIK Transmeta WAS NOT Amiga Inc Partner.

It's debatable whether they were actually ever a partner, true. Amiga Inc *DID* list them as a partner at one time though.

[redrumloa]

EntilZha wrote:
It's a bit far-fetched to blame the failure of Transmeta on Amiga, or why do you mention them as "Amiga, Inc partner archive" members ?

Blame on Amiga Inc? You are reading far to much into this. The current Amiga Inc has absolutey nothing to do with any success or failure of "partners" from years past. If you are talking about "The Amiga Curse", it's not me that mentioned it.

-Edit-
There is of course, a natural curiosity to see what ever became of previous "partners". Like most here I'm sure, I was here reading every word posted, hanging on to every sentence back then anxious to see what would become of the Amiga, after every direction change. The "partners" were a critical piece of this, what role would they play? Now that the partnerships evaporated, it's still curious to see what they could have brought to the plate, or what they are up to. They all had a small hand in the history of the Amiga. Given in most cases a VERY small hand, as they all seem to have been a partner on paper only.

[MskoDestny]

Their "Code Morphing" technology never seemed to impressive to me.  It was little more than a dynarec/JIT running from firmware on a somewhat specialized VLIW chip.  Said chip was designed to be used for x86 emulation as it uses the x86 flag calculation behavior (flag calculation is easily the nastiest part of a CPU emulator to optimize, well at least when you're emulating a CISC CPU anyway).

[minatorb]

Their "Code Morphing" technology never seemed to impressive to me. It was little more than a dynarec/JIT running from firmware on a somewhat specialized VLIW chip.

It was a binary re-compiler, it recompiles the code on the fly the stores it on disc.  Each subsequent thus gets faster.

DEC had great success with this in their FX32! x86 emulator for the Alpha, at one stage in the 90s the fastest x86 was actually an Alpha!  One thing that halped though was the fact that the version of Windows it used was native so all the library calls were not emulated.

--

Transmeta are, as far as I can tell about to get out of the chip business.  They make more money off licensing their technology (i.e. they recently licnsed longrun 2 to Sony) than the CPUs so they're just going to do this instead.

--

As for being in the same league as VIA, I doubt it, VIA is the undisputed champion of sucky CPUs, the Transmeta CPUs are not great but they don't suck *that* much.

[MskoDestny]

The dynarec inside the Crusoe didn't save anything to disk, it operated completely out of memory.  Caching translated code to disk isn't practical when the emulation occurs underneath the operating system.