Transmeta Crusoe

I worked on that as a QA Engineer. My favorite accomplishment was discovering that one version of a Crusoe-powered system would irrevocably hang while playing Tomb Raider 2 for between 15 and 45 minutes. It took an entire VLSI team over a week to debug that one. The problem had something to do with a voltage drop on a certain chipset.<p>I also enjoyed discovering that HTTPS didn’t work on Internet Explorer 5.5, jump jets recharged at 10% the expected rate in MechWarrior 2, and a certain modem worked on PCI slots 1 and 3 &amp; didn’t work in PCI slots 2 and 4.

The Crusoe was a brave effort that never really lived up to its promise. There was plenty of hype before the release (transmeta.com was, for a long time, a blank page with a hidden message in the source, which combined with them employing Linus left people hugely excited about what they were actually going to make), but what we ended up with was a low power but fairly slow x86 that had some exciting bugs (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20051202073851&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.auc.dk&#x2F;~fleury&#x2F;bug_cms&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20051202073851&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.auc....</a>). In the pre-JIT times, being able to run Java bytecode directly would have been a win, but it doesn&#x27;t look like that was ever an actual produce and even then it was unclear whether you would have been able to switch between instruction sets at runtime fast enough to support a mixed Java&#x2F;x86 environment. And before long, Intel had chips that weren&#x27;t far outside the power envelope but ran much faster.<p>It&#x27;s a shame that the would only run signed CMS images - having a laptop you could switch over to running a different architecture would still be a very neat toy.

My home NIS server is HP T5510 thin client running on Crusoe:<p><pre><code> $ lscpu Architecture: i586 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 1 On-line CPU(s) list: 0 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per socket: 1 Socket(s): 1 Vendor ID: GenuineTMx86 CPU family: 5 Model: 4 Model name: Transmeta(tm) Crusoe(tm) Processor TM5700 Stepping: 3 CPU MHz: 798.025 BogoMIPS: 1596.05 t5510 ~ # longrun -p LongRun: enabled LongRun Thermal Extensions (LTX): active LTX setting: 75% reduction Current performance window: 0 to 100 Current performance level: 0 LongRun flags: economy</code></pre>

I worked at Transmeta for a short time (about a year) after my undergrad. I loved it. However, there was always a running joke that the stock ticker symbol should have been “HYPE”. It was sad to see things implode the way they did.

What I remember most about Transmeta was that they employed Linus Torvalds. This gave the name instant status and recognition among the Slashdot crowd and similar places.

One important piece missing from this story: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;250776-intel-quietly-threatens-microsoft-qualcomm-x86-emulation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.extremetech.com&#x2F;computing&#x2F;250776-intel-quietly-t...</a>

This brings back memories! I worked for Colin Hunter at Hunter Systems which was the company before Transmeta. It was in a similar space. Their product recompiled DOS 8088 programs--using a similar &quot;dynamic binary translator&quot; as the Crusoe--so they can run on various Unix systems (68k, MIPS) as &quot;native code&quot;. I worked on the thing that remapped the video screen memory to VT100 commands so you can see your Microsoft Word on a template.<p>In a similar space today are these folks who figured out how to built an 8-bit CPU with only 17 TTL chips:<p>See:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.io&#x2F;project&#x2F;165950-cscvon8-an-8-bit-ttl-cpu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hackaday.io&#x2F;project&#x2F;165950-cscvon8-an-8-bit-ttl-cpu</a><p>This could have been built back in the mid 70s, there was just nobody smart enough to figure it out. It relies on a very simple set of instructions and microcode to implement the instructions of a more capable CPU.

I spent my hard-earned college freelancing money on a Sony Picturebook with this chipset. It was actually a really nice laptop! 8-ish hours of battery, and tiny. It had WiFi via a PCMCIA card, so it was great for the couch. The screen was really only big enough for a single terminal.<p>Despite the reputation for instability &#x2F; bugs, it was actually rock solid running Debian.

See also the most impactful cpu no one&#x27;s heard of: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;NexGen" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;NexGen</a>

I used a Fujitsu P2000 Lifebook in college back in ~2001, it was awesome. 6+ hours of battery life (pretty wild for that time) :)

Russian Elbrus CPU appears to be a Transmeta on steroids. I am quite skeptical of the things made by Russian Government, but this seems to be a genuinely good device, able to emulate x64 at Core Duo speeds.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these babies…

I had one of these in a Sharp Actius MM10, and I could write and compile C++ in Visual Studio for most of the day, using the oversized battery. When that time was spent sitting in a coffee shop I&#x27;d probably get 3+ people a day asking me about it, due to the size. It was an excellent device, and probably still ahead of its time.

Don&#x27;t remember verifying with people I used to know that worked at Transmeta, but I recall they originally were going to for performance but then Intel decided to up their game. That&#x27;s when they decided to push the power angle. Can someone correct me on the specifics?<p>From another distant memory I remember a story from someone I knew at Transmeta bent over backwards on the Code Morphing Software to get a soft-modem (modem that used the CPU to do some of the work that traditionally would be done in an asic) to work with Crusoe. Sounded like a case of saving $2 on BOM (I&#x27;m just making up numbers) in order to get a design win.

I had a Compaq TC1000 which was powered by one of these things. Needed a battery-powered stylus, the keyboard never really could hold up the slate &#x2F; rest of the computer.<p>Yet I used it nearly daily at school, since it was considered a &#x27;study aid&#x27; because I took notes with the included Agilix journal system that came with Windows XP Tablet PC edition...right up until I discovered this thing called OneNote 2003 and well, let&#x27;s just say that while the TC1000s themselves are in retirement on the shelf, Onenote is here to stay.<p>All thanks to that funkily-named processor Transmeta Crusoe .

I remember Transmeta being the stealth startup that was super tight lipped about what they were working on back then. The skinnable instruction set stuff was really cool, but if I recall the only products that really made it to market were laptops with the x86 skin, where the coolest feature of them went largely ignored and they ended up seeing what market success they did because they had reasonable price&#x2F;power&#x2F;heat properties for low cost laptops.

The Transmeta Crusoe CPU reminded me of an article I read years earlier about powerful CPUs. The article said the upcoming Pentium would be so powerful you wouldn&#x27;t need a physical modem it would be emulated in software. That blew my mind that hardware could be emulated inside software.

For many years I had to resist the urge to buy an OQO, which ran on the Crusoe (and you may remember as the handheld PC from the sci-fi series Jericho):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OQO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;OQO</a>

&quot;This page is not here yet.&quot; was the Transmeta homepage whilst they were in stealth mode.

I knew a wannabe geek in high school who loved to brag about bullshit for nerd cred. My favorite lie was his boast about his dual core &quot;transmeata crusoe&quot; and how he morphed one of the processors into a 3D accelerator which made a GeForce unnecessary.

Another similar CPU is Nvidia&#x27;s Denver. It was intended to run both x86 and ARM, but patents got in the way so now it&#x27;s just ARM. Is there any merit to this design?

I miss my Compaq TC1000. Not for the performance but because it felt like I was &quot;using the future&quot; between the relatively novel 2-in-1 format and the CPU.

I have a Fujitsu P2110 with the Transmeta Crusoe CPU. It was passed along by a friend who had upgraded to a more powerful machine but didn&#x27;t want it to go into the trash. She said it was &quot;slow slow SLOW&quot;.<p>Well, yes. The machine had 256MB RAM, and the Crusoe grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. It came to me with WinXP SP2. XP wants 512MB RAM minimum to think about performing. It took <i>8 minutes</i> to boot, and longer to do anything once up. It did a good job of emulating classic mainframe &quot;death by thrashing&quot; You could get a daughter card to add 128MB RAM, but that wouldn&#x27;t help in this case. (There was another daughter card for an earlier Fujitsu model that added 256MB, but I couldn&#x27;t find confirmation it worked in the P2110.)<p>I treated it as an experiment to see what performance I could coax out of low end hardware without throwing money at it. I swapped in a drive from a failed laptop, repartioned and reformatted, and set it to multi-boot. Win2K Pro SP4 actually ran, more or less, on the P2110, especially after I took everything out of startup that could be removed. I also installed two flavors of Linux - Ubuntu and Puppy, and FreeDOS.<p>Puppy was designed for low end hardware, and Puppy itself worked well enough. Applications didn&#x27;t. The speed bump was apparently the IDE4 HD. IDE4 was a BIOS limitation, so swapping in a faster drive wouldn&#x27;t assist.<p>Installing Ubuntu was a challenge. Xubuntu downloaded and installed, but performance was snail slow. Posters on the Ubuntu forums said too much Gnome had crept into Xubuntu, and Ubuntu had a steadily increasing idea of what &quot;low end&quot; was. The recommended what I did - DL the Minimal CD and install from it. That would give me a working bare bones CLI installation, and I could use apt-get to pick and choose what else got added. Lubuntu got the nod as desktop GUI, and worked, though it was noting I&#x27;d call speedy.<p>Puppy and Ubuntu were both installed on ext4 file systems, and mounted each other&#x27;s slices when they booted. I spent some time arranging things so there was <i>one</i> copy of large apps shared between them.<p>FreeDOS flew. The challenge with it was to get it to boot from grub2. I did, but have no idea which of the fiddles I tried actually made it work.<p>Ubuntu provided another quirk. A new Ubuntu release came out. This one required PXE. The P2110 didn&#x27;t have it. Installation proceeded normally, but things went to hell in a bucket when I reboted after install. Lack of PXE made installation of the new kernel fail, and that caused a cascade failure. I had to wipe the Ubuntu FS slice and redo from scratch, carefully stopping at the last release that worked and staying put. A test in the installer to insure that PXE was present before continuing and refusing to upgrade if not would have been nice. I assumed the Ubuntu folks just never imagined someone would try to install on a machine that lacked it.<p>I got surprise email from a woman in Hong Kong who also had a P2110. She got the 256MB RAM expansion card, it worked, and she was running WinXP with acceptable performance. I tipped my hat in respect, but had retired the P2110. I was an experiment, the experiment was completed, and actual work got done elsewhere.<p>I still have the machine, but haven&#x27;t booted it in ages.

I was the last engineering employee of Novafora, which bought Transmeta. Shortly after, both were wound down.<p>Intel bought all the IP in a private auction for about $200k. (I was the other bidder, and hoped to Open Source the EDA tools.) The files were on a single old server, so not sure if anything still exists.<p>I own the tapeout server (CS22 - quad-CPU Opteron with 64 GB RAM) used by both companies, which I plan to donate to the Computer History Museum.<p>Transmeta only used AMD servers for some reason, I guess it was because they felt they were in competition with Intel. Kind of like how grocery stores don&#x27;t want to use AWS because it would &quot;pay the competition&quot; (Amazon owns Whole Foods.)

So did they get bought out by the NSA or something? It&#x27;s weird how the whole company and everything else just disappeared.

This seems like the exact same story as Magic Leap among others.