MaximumPC 2003 12

+FAST FORWARD BY^ TOM R. HALFHILL

Like its namesake who was stranded

on a lonely island, Transmeta’s Crusoe needs a rescue.

The innovative notebook processor appeared in 2000

with promises of high performance and lower power

consumption for mobile PCs. Unfortunately, Crusoe’s

performance has been lackluster and Intel is fighting

back with the low-power, higher-speed Pentium M.

Transmeta suffers from what I call the “pecking

order of magnitude”: Intel sells about 10 times as many

mobile processors as AMD, and AMD sells about 10

times as many mobile processors as Transmeta. That

leaves Transmeta struggling for 1 percent market

share. Now the company has a last chance to win a

meaningful piece of the pie—its new Efficeon TM

improves on Crusoe and offers some cool new features.

Efficeon, like Crusoe, is an x86-compatible processor

but not an x86 processor. Inside, it’s a VLIW (very long

instruction word) architecture that isn’t compatible with

anything. It runs x86 software by using what Transmeta

calls “code-morphing software” and everyone else

calls a software emulator, which translates x86 program

instructions into VLIW instructions on the fly.

Code morphing is clever, but the downside is

laggard performance—Crusoe has never delivered

the speed that its clock frequencies imply. (And those

clock frequencies haven’t been very aggressive, either.)

But with Efficeon, Transmeta is introducing numerous

refinements that make emulation more efficient, and

new support for Intel’s SSE and SSE2 extensions will

boost multimedia performance. The overall performance

gap remains, but it’s not as wide.

To narrow the gap further, Efficeon is more integrated

than any other PC processor. Not only does it have

the equivalent of a north-bridge chip with a DDR-

memory controller, but it also has an AGP-4x graphics

controller and a 200/400MHz HyperTransport interface

to the south-bridge chip. These built-in features help

relieve some system bottlenecks and save power.

Even more fascinating is an enhancement to

Transmeta’s power-saving LongRun technology,

which varies the chip’s voltage and clock frequency

in response to software demands. In addition to

voltage/frequency variations, Efficeon processors can

automatically change the transistor threshold voltage—

the voltage at which the transistors switch between

on/off states—to reduce leakage current. At lower

clock frequencies, Efficeon raises the threshold voltage,

which leaks less current and saves power. At higher

frequencies, Efficeon lowers the threshold voltage, so

the transistors can switch more rapidly.

Efficeon is a worthy contender, even against Intel’s

second-generation Pentium M (Dothan). However, if

Efficeon cannot surpass Crusoe’s sales, Transmeta will

probably retreat from mobile PCs, focus entirely on the

embedded-processor market, and seek financial refuge

in a merger with a larger company.

Transmeta’s

Last Chance

Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and

now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.

June 2003

August 2003

May 2003

September 30, 2003

October 7,

2003

Maximum PC investigates how Half-Life 2 will

scale with different types of PC hard-

ware, including CPUs and videocards.

At an industry gala on Alcatraz

island, Valve and ATI co-launch

Half-Life 2 and the Radeon 9800

XT videocard. Neither the

benchmark nor the game is

anywhere in sight.

Valve announces that its office network has

been compromised, and that a large amount

of Valve intellectual property has been sto-

len, including significant portions of the Half-

Life 2 source code.

Knowing that the breech to HL2 servers

could lead to multiplayer cheating and

denial of service attacks, Valve begins

the painstaking process of rewriting the

game’s source code.

Vivendi Universal, the publisher of

Half-Life 2 , announces that the

game has been delayed indefinitely.

Maximum PC discovers that chunks of the

Half-Life 2 source code have been assimi-

lated into the Matrix and are responsible for

Agent Smith’s abrupt personality change.

Gaming mags, such as PC Gamer , publish their

accounts of the first Half-Life 2 play tests.

Highlights include a hyper-realistic physics

engine and omnipresent DirectX 9 program-

mable shader effects.

Valve began working on Half-Life 2 shortly

after the original game was released, but

didn’t say a word about it for five years.

At the 2003 E3 gaming convention, Valve

stuns attendees by announcing Half-Life 2’s

September 30, 2003 launch date.

October 2,

2003

September 10,

2003

October 7, 2003

October 3, 2003

Valve CEO Gabe Newell drops a bench-

marking bomb on nVidia at an ATI

press event when he claims that ATI’s

mid-level, $200 Radeon 9600 videocard

outperforms the $500 GeForce FX 5900.

nVidia counters by saying the drivers

used weren’t optimized for Half-Life 2 ,

and guarantees top-class Half-Life 2

performance. Newell promises a Half-

Life 2 benchmark on September 30.

The Long Road to Half-Life 2

The story of one game’s strange, erotic journey

through development hell

It takes a special something to bump Doom 3 from the mantle of “most eagerly

anticipated game,” and that’s exactly what happened when Valve announced Half-

Life 2 earlier this year. However, the months following the game’s announcement

have included an unprecedented level of drama. Here’s the basic rundown.

6 MAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2003