The Transmeta Pushme-Pullyou? 63
tired.cranky writes: "An article on LinuxDevices.com sez that Transmeta is about to ship a quasi-distro slash embedded development toolkit featuring Linus' new super-efficient cramfs and ramfs filesystems. Apparently, a reasonably normal Linux system can be shoehorned into 8MB of storage, with zlib decompression-on-demand and such. It sounds like it could push a fair few hobbyists and embedded developers in Transmeta's general direction, too... and reads nicely next to a Register piece on Transmeta's leaked server initiative. Does one end of Transmeta know where the other is pointed?"
Hobysts... ON 1 GHz ??????? (Score:1)
They actually have a good point. (Score:3)
It's a neat angle, but then again being able to play solitaire during your entire flight cross-country was a good angle, and that doesn't seem to have panned out. I hope it works, not because I love transmeta, but because I just like seeing cool technology win.
It's hypocrisy. (Score:1)
Re:So now all Transmeta can do is Heath kits? (Score:1)
All i want to know is . . . why cant i have one?
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:4)
It might not be a big deal now, but how about in 6 months or so when the real cost of electricity is passed on to the consumers? If you started paying 10x more for your electricity than you're paying now, will power savings be an issue?
-jon
Re:Linux? Who gives a shit about Linux? (Score:2)
Really. So, if Windows is the superior operating system, and, by logical extension, Microsoft's code is superior, I have two questions:
1. Why did Microsoft use GPLed code in its FTP.EXE program included with Windows? (Load it into a hex editor and look for Regents)
2. Why is Win2K's TCP/IP stack fingerprint nearly identical to a BSD fingerprint (BSD having been around longer)?
Re:Top 10 Reasons to Move to Windows 2000 Professi (Score:2)
Nice going, guys, keep it up. Waste your time flaming Linux on Slashdot while the rest of the world is busy actually writing real code and not flashy interfaces for a buggy platform. Idiots.
I know I'll probably get flamed for this, but... (Score:1)
Re:Linux? Who gives a shit about Linux? (Score:1)
Ashes of Empires and bodies of kings,
Saint Nick just doesn't like Dietzel - it's heat! (Score:5)
People don't care about low power on servers. Even if the power costs and cooling costs are trippled, only a handful are in a position where optimizing for power, not speed is important.
Theoretical peak, N cheap processors is much more powerful than one expensive processor
Then why are sales of low-power servers skyrocketing, especially in San Francisco, which someone from Berkeley should know about. Hint: read the local business pages sometime. I do up here in Seattle, and it's reported here.
There are high-demand servers, mid-demand servers, and back-up servers. For high-demand, constant traffic servers your arguments make a lot of sense. For mid-demand or failsafe rollover servers, the heat cost and power cost are a higher fraction of the operating expense of the server, which is likely a cheaper box with dual drives but chock full o RAM.
Servers don't come in one size or one shape. Some people serve up lots of static pages, some people have worldwide operations. Others have frequent low-traffic periods and may have a primary hit box with some image servers that can afford to have a little lag time and would get a high return on code-replication as it serves the same file over and over and over and over and over.
Just because you don't like Dietzel doesn't make you right. Think before you post, do some research, a few base google queries, check the local trade mags, before leaping to assumptions.
In disguise... (Score:1)
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:3)
Unlike California, where there's a 10 percent rate cap on power prices, both Oregon and Washington states have no such limits and we're looking at 50 to 150 percent price hikes over the next six months, some of which will be permanent.
So, especially in other portions of the Pacific Northwest, this is very much an issue.
A sight to see (Score:1)
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Six of One meet Seven of Nine (Score:2)
Ouch.
Of course 100 cpu's need more ram etc. and all that jazz I suppose, but then what do I know, I work with handhelds/embedded systems not huge servers.
Can you imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those?
sorry, but it might have some practical applications.
I'd do it (Score:2)
1) Why be wasteful? Just because you can afford to do something doesn't mean you should. I pay about 5% more to use 100% renewable power [green-e.org]. (Before the latest crisis, I paid 20% less.)
2) It's cheaper. Even under moderate assumptions, you could save a couple thousand dollars a year [slashdot.org] for a medium-sized commercial web site. That money would be much better spent on more hardware. Or more beer.
3) It's cooler. Not in the sense of hipness, but in terms of temperature. If the Register's numbers [theregister.co.uk] for a dual-Itanium server power consumption are to be believed, a couple of those babies would put out more heat as a hair dryer [epinions.com] or a space heater [calpoly.edu].
Judging by Athalon's heat output [amd.com], the heat output of typical CPUs scales 1:1 with speed. A lot of server rooms I enter are already running a little warm; imagine what it will be like after a round of upgrades to faster and hotter boxes.
Maybe you can afford to pay for the electricity, but can you afford to pay for a massive upgrade to your air conditioning?
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:1)
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:1)
I don't know of any CIO's sending out panicked staffers scouring for "low power servers - Transmeta if you can get 'em!"
Me neither, but that could be an extension of not knowing any CIOs period.
That was not supposed to be a swipe at your use of apostrophes. I believe it may even be acceptable to use them with acronyms
I need a breathalyzer on my submit button
I care about wattage! (Score:1)
Suppose you want to host a fictional colocation hosting company. You want to deploy a bunch of web servers. Now, let's say that you've got a 6x6 cage, 24 sq feet. Your colocation provider tells you that they can supply you with 100 watts per square foot of power and heat dissipation capability. From the information I have, this is a reasonable to high assumption. So, you figure you'll put in two racks (2'x3' each), each 42u high. Figure once you put in your power distribution, switches, etc, you're left with 32u of space in each rack. So, you figure you can deploy 1u servers in the remaining space. That's 64 servers! So you merrily deploy them until you remember wattage. So, you do the math. Each server is rated at 200 watts. Even assuming that your other equipment (network switch, etc.) doesn't take any wattage, you've got 3600 watts to play with. 3600 watts divided by 200 watts/server = 18 servers. Definitely not optimal.
So, what do you do? You try to reduce the wattage consumption/dissipation of the servers (remember, power in = heat dissipated). You want the wattage per server number down well below 100.
Thus, if you want to deploy a high density 1u server configuration in your datacenter, power consumption is going to be critically important to you. That is, unless the datacenter is built to pump in high amounts of electricity and pump out huge amounts of heat.
Re:So where can we get this sucker at? (Score:1)
Re:Linux? Who gives a shit about Linux? (Score:1)
Ahh, enightenment...
Linux bloatware (Score:4)
And we're supposed to be impressed? Let me break the news here. QNX did it ages ago when they squeezed their kernel, GUI, web browser, mail client and tcp/ip stack into a SINGLE 1.44 MB floppy. Oh, the power of Closed Source!
The Space Between (Score:1)
Then it will clap!
Dietzel is "on crack", from a technical standpoint (Score:4)
The low power, many microprocessor solution has been propounded many times, and it has routinely failed in the marketplace. Why?
Similarly, non-SMP machines have repeatedly failed when compared to SMP machines, because a message passing machine is much more difficult to program. Yes, if you can rephrase your programs to run on a cluster, then you see the impressive possibility in cost/performance, but it is really difficult to program well. People pay the extra cost for SMP machines simply because they can actually program them for a wider variety of applications.
Most problems which can be translated to a message passing structure have already been migrated to clusters of cheap machines. It is problems like databases, which don't map well to message passing, which is why people buy "servers", and it is these problems which are why people buy E10ks.
Dietzel knows better, he is an intelligent scientist, but he is acting like some corporate PR flack. Such dishonesty I can accept from someone who is ignorant, but he knows better.
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:2)
Um, which government would that be? The government which is headed by TWO ex-oilmen? The government which was bought by large engergy concerns? The government whose "help" to California so far has been to offer to remove pollution caps? Give me a break.
Dubya and Vice President Heart Attack are going to screw California to the wall. Since they won't win in California in 2004, anyway (and since virtually all statewide and national officials from California are Democrats), they don't care.
Maybe what California needs to do is stop passing along tax revenues to the federal government. Then we can see if they're willing to help.
-jon
Re:But why zlib? (Score:1)
both of these algorithms seem to be optimized for small memory systems. And they're fast.
habbit could explain it best I guess, but I haven't used either myself.
the author's address is:
http://wildsau.idv.uni-linz.ac.at/mfx/nrv.html
It's about heat, not power crisis! (Score:1)
Low power servers means less heating. Less heating means higher density of elements on chips. It means no special cooling devices. Even my PIII laptop now has to come with cooling fan on the side! That means I spend battery energy to produce heat and to run fan to disperse it.
It is not about power crisis! It is about chip design.
Transmeta (Score:1)
Re:It's going to run slash? (Score:1)
Ah, there's the problem. Well, I um, I meant it that way. It's, um, part of the joke... Ok, ok, I admit it, this is a horrible example of C code. Sorry. it was just a silly joke.
Re:Dietzel is "on crack", from a technical standpo (Score:2)
costs and cooling costs are trippled, only a handful are in a
position where optimizing for power, not speed is important.
At LWE, he talked about the Exodus deal. "People don't care" is false, with Exodus being case-and-point. Exodus is limited, by the state of California, as to how much power they can consume and thus how much they can expand. They are reaching their limits right now, with their current architecture. Thus, it's pretty evident that Exodus does 'care' enough about lowered power consumption, enough to make the move to these low-wattage configurations.
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:1)
Of course, even this is a gross overgeneralization of a very politicized system.
Re:Why don't you explain what Pushme-pullya is? (Score:1)
"push me"
"shove you"
"Push Me!"
"Shove You!"
"PUSH ME!"
"SHOVE YOU!"
Then again, maybe not...
Re:Top 10 Reasons to Move to Windows 2000 Professi (Score:1)
>As this list proves,
Try that idea of a proof in a math (or logic) course.
>cutting computer-related unproductive time by as much as 41 percent.
No, I do not want to reduce my
>the average system uptime of Windows 2000 Professional was over 50 times that of Windows 98 and 17 times that of Windows NT Workstation 4.0.
Then why are Windows 98 and NT 4.0 so bad? And now Windows 2000 is suddenly so good??? At this point I'd say that RedHat 7.0 is almost as stable as RedHat 4.2. Can't really tell. They don't go down often enough to make a comparison.
>Mobile computing is simpler and more efficient
Right. Leave your computer, and it's files at home or work, and securely run programs on it from elsewhere as different users? Simultaneously!
>comprehensive security features
Does this mean that my browsing
Will this have an impact? (Score:3)
My impression is that Intel is having problems recognizing how to deal with the appliance picture and small devices, and that Transmeta has maybe an 18 month lead on them. But they're not the only players in this sphere, so this is going to depend on the following things:
1. How fast Transmeta can ship production quantity chips for this market.
2. How well device manufacturers integrate these in a useable way.
3. How interested the consumer market is in these devices.
4. What pricing strategy Transmeta has for this.
5. How far competitors are willing to go with fake media releases, arm twisting, collusion, and rumors to sink Transmeta.
6. Where G Bush and Bill G and their posses have invested their money in this area - if the regulators and the tech money interests are all after Transmeta, the best solution may not necessarily win, unless it can get its own crew behind it.
advertising posting? (Score:1)
8 MB? (Score:1)
So now all Transmeta can do is Heath kits? (Score:2)
Re:six of one (Score:2)
Several things play in transmeta's favor:
1) server code is fixed. This means that the costs due to code morphing don't need to be paid often. This is akin to java's HotSpot technology -- it needs to run a long time to amortize its startup costs. I expect crusoes to work better in servers than in clients for this reason alone.
2) Because they can effectively hibernate when idle, you only pay for electricity for the cycles you use. If budgets are tight, you could envisage a system with under-specced cooling, and temp monitoring -- this would allow you to run at say 80% of maximum constantly, and at 100% for short periods until the temperature rose too high and the processors were forcibly throttled back. This probably fits many usage scenarios very well.
3) If it takes several crusoes to replace one itanium, those crosoes will also be much more fault tolerant, allowing you to continue at a lower capacity while the faulty one is replaced and rebooted.
Re:Linux bloatware (Score:1)
You're comparing apples and oranges. QNX squeezed a demo onto a single 1.44 MB floppy. It doesn't have any provision for writable storage. It has a generic slow VGA display driver. It has just two basic applications. It's a demo. This Linux system, however, appears to be a useful foundation for product development.
Re:Linux bloatware (Score:1)
Linux is an OK unix clone (and a very average one at that). But when it comes to embedded stuff it can't touch commercial offerings. Wake up and smell the coffee or the revolution will pass you by.
PS. I'm in no way associated with QNX Inc. Just a humble fan of their OS.
Re:It's going to run slash? (Score:1)
What are you some kind of moron? The "slash" isn't meaning SlashCode. Simply meaning "/", as in you are ugly / big nosed. -Cheers!
Don't eat Taco Meat from a 3 eyed mexican!
six of one (Score:2)
Of course, holding power fixed, you get more computing horsepower than intel. However, most companies decide on the cpu power first, and then accomodate that with space, cooling, and electricity infrastructure.
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:2)
On what planet?
I don't know of any CIO's sending out panicked staffers scouring for "low power servers - Transmeta if you can get 'em!"
Electrical consumption is a concern for cooling and supply and such but as far as I've seen everyone takes the power-bill as a part of doing business. Turning off the lights is a good thing but nobody is getting ready to rebuild their server bays with with new equpment full of low-power chips. We've all got too many concerns to go jumping hardware platforms over this.
Sell me a bunch of Transmeta products on price / performance / support / versatility / reliability / etc. but power savings? That's just not that big a deal to us.
You KNOW a FS is good when... (Score:3)
Re:six of one (Score:2)
"Transmeta founder Dave Ditzel says we can expect servers with hundreds of Crusoe CPUs later this year."
But why zlib? (Score:1)
-
Re:six of one (Score:2)
16cpu x 100w/cpu = 1600w for the Intel cpu's
and
100cpu x 1w/cpu = 100w for the Crusoe's
Ouch.
Of course 100 cpu's need more ram etc. and all that jazz I suppose, but then what do I know, I work with handhelds/embedded systems not huge servers.
So where can we get this sucker at? (Score:1)
A little math for your edification... (Score:4)
Let us assume a 1u high rackmount mini-server, which is burning 100W of power [1], and which will have a 2 year lifetime before you call it obsolete and scrap it because the space you are renting would be better served by new machines.
Now let us assume a ridiculous power cost of $.50/kwh (note, current rates are around $.10/kwh, and may rise as high as $.15 when all is said and done. Even if you are being charged for cooling as part of the power budget, 50 cents a kilowatt hour is a ridiculous charge).
This means the server costs $.05/hr to operate, or about $900 in lifetime power costs over the 2 year lifetime, assuming vastly overpriced power.
Now given a miracle transmeta server which burns only 50W (after all, you still have to power the ethernet, disks, memory, etc). EVEN IF it has identical performance, it can only cost $450 more for it to be cost effective. If it is lower performance along with lower power (which it will be), there is no point in purchasing it.
[1] Current dual processor, stacked, HIGH end (2x933 MHz PIII) 1u systems will burn ~200W. Couple that with a still excessive but slightly more reasonable power cost of $.25/kwh and the calucation is roughly the same: a lifetime power cost of $900. Something like the BriQ is only burning 40W, but being sold for the remarkably low form factor (can probably fit 4 in a 1U rackmount), not ops/W.
Nicholas C Weaver, Winged Rat Consulting
nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:2)
That said (and it's sometimes important to remind folks that the world does extend beyond SillyValley) I still don't see this being a big concern. Yes electricity costs are big, but service, reliability and standardization are still more important to most Sr. IS folks and they'll continue to be so even with double or treble electrical costs. There's a buttload of technology and skills based on those x86 boxes and they're not about to start getting swapped out for the power bill.
Even as folks do start specing out their next technology refresh I don't know that Transmeta's power-savings are all that big a sales point. Overall their technology is still, er, not established. Supply seems single-sourced and they've no track record. Great promise but that means most folks might buy one to evaluate, hold off on any big committments for a year or two. Besides, many of us already have multi-year contracts in place.
On the other hand if we were to consider moving to a lower-power chip alternative PowerPC chips are out there, they're also comparatively low power, relatively cheap and are a well known, well established design. If anyone is going to reap any windfall out of high electrical prices and servers it's PPC. I'd expect to be seeing a possible future spike (note "future possible" - your BS about there all being one is just that: BS) with them before Transmeta reaps much from their power-savings.
Web farms change everything (Score:2)
A big issue with web farms is data centre space and cooling - Transmeta can greatly reduce this if it fits many CPUs in a single box within the same heat/power budget. Even if they just have one or two CPUs per box, they can make an impact on this.
Re:Linux bloatware (Score:1)
Why don't you explain what Pushme-pullya is? (Score:1)
just a thought...
Re:Top 10 Reasons to Move to Windows 2000 Professi (Score:1)
PS: Please, I need the source code too, my hardware has some home made stuff.
Thanks.
The first thing Linuxdevices.com should do (Score:1)
From 0 to /.'ed in 3.6 seconds...
Re:It's going to run slash? (Score:1)
Visual C++ 6 throws this compiler error if you try it:
error C2562: 'main' : 'void' function returning a value
Should fit in a DiskonChip Millenium (Score:1)
Anybody know where to buy a small (set-top sized) case for a Micro-ATX motherboard? I don't need any space for drives, because it won't have any.
It's going to run slash? (Score:5)
And how does one develop under such a system? Post your programs and hope they get modded up to compile-threshold level?
gateway already ships this (Score:2)
Re:interesting article about Transmeta (Score:1)
"One example is the Gateway Connected Touchpad currently shipping for around $500. "
Can't they see... (Score:1)
Re:Sounds cool (Score:1)
Re:It's going to run slash? (Score:1)
Of course, you could write karma whore code to get the compiler to notice you.
void main(void)
{
linux=++good;
windows=++un_good;
return WINDOWS_TO_THE_STORE
}
Re:Will this have an impact? (Score:2)