Author

Topic: Transmetta (Read 939 times)

newbie
Activity: 54
Merit: 0
August 11, 2011, 12:24:48 AM
#3
FYI Transmeta is bankrupt, and their CPUs are no longer produced.  I do see quite a number of their CPUs on Ebay however.

The problem here is that Transmeta's actual VLIW format is proprietary, meaning nobody can write code for it natively except Transmeta (which won't happen since they don't exist anymore).  The other fundamental issues are:
1. Old architecture, last fabbed at 130nm (slow)
2. Up to 4 parallel instructions per clock.  This would make it equivalent to SSE2 in terms of throughput per clock rate.  Their VLIW design gives them no advantage here over a modern x86 CPU.

Even if you could write your own VLIW code, this thing would be certainly slower than 1MH/s, most likely much slower.
legendary
Activity: 1708
Merit: 1011
August 10, 2011, 10:26:14 PM
#2
I can't imagine that it would be worthwhile, unless someone were going to do it just for the geek cred.  Feel free, tho.
sr. member
Activity: 462
Merit: 250
It's all about the game, and how you play it
August 10, 2011, 10:19:58 PM
#1
in the spirit of mining with whatever we can has anyone considered using a efficion or crusoe cpu for bitcoin mining? they were lower power chips based on a 128 bit(crusoe) or 256 bit (efficion) vliw arcitecture it should be possible to bypass or take advantage of in some way the "code moprhing" layer that was used to translate x86 instructions into native instructions
Jump to: