AMD to offer Transmeta's Efficeon

HOW THINGS CHANGE in a year! In 2005, Transmeta announced that they were moving away from being a "chip" company, would focus on flogging their IP, and would allow a Chinese company, Culturecom, to take over selling the Crusoe and Efficeon processors.

Transmeta had struggled with the complexity of their design; essentially a simple, low power VLIW engine running a crafty emulation layer, known as CMS, that allowed it to pretend transparently to be an x86 processor.

With long delays, the realisation that their design was highly cache-dependent, and Chipzilla's catching on to the "low power is good" concept, the tiny chipmaker was always going to struggle.

Well now they're back: as with so many things rumoured, the partnership with AMD has eventually come true, with AMD announcing that they were taking over the marketing and sales of what is now imaginatively known as the AMD Efficeon, still manufactured by Fujitsu.

While the announcement from Transmeta explicitly linked the new Efficeon design to AMD's 50x15 effort to sell lots of PCs in the developing world, we couldn't help but wonder if there was a link between this and the announcement that Samsung would be releasing UMPCs based on AMD chips.

Let's think about it… a tiny portable device with even the lowest powered Turion 64 and ATi chipset in would take considerably more juice than the 900MHz Celeron M ULV (5.5W) driving it at present, and is a physically large solution - not ideal!

So if it's an AMD x86 chip driving this, we're really left with three options:

1) It's a Geode LX chip - advantages: very cheap, small, reasonable runtime low power, but poor idle power and not exactly class-leading performance (think VIA C3 at around 700MHz)

2) It's the next generation of Geode architecture: the Dragonfly. This was originally set for a release in H1 2006, so might be on the cards still. Dragonfly's specs were fairly well-suited - a 90nm 1GHz core, large L2 cache and on-chip PCI express, coupled with low average power consumption.

3) It's an Efficeon, probably the TM8820. Available in a tiny package, just 2x2cm, with DDR, AGP and HT interfaces, 1GHz at around 3W (inc the north bridge) with excellent performance. And the key advantage - LongRun 2: a combination of power saving techniques from dynamic clock and voltage reduction, aggressive clock gating, with the pièce de résistance - an incredibly clever method of reducing the processor's leakage in the lower power states by biasing the substrate, which has been licensed to Sony, NEC, Toshiba and Fujitsu.

All of this results in a very low idle power state, and in turn should lead to battery life better than anything else x86.

ULi offered a tiny HT-connected south bridge, M1563S, which completed the Efficeon as a very compact platform, rumoured to be making its way into smartphones back before it got the chop.

Our tests showed that a 90nm Efficeon at 1.6GHz (still barely warm to the touch), was churning out similar 3DMark scores to an Athlon XP 1800+, so not much by modern standards, but still enough to be a very usable Windows XP PC.

Could Efficeon be at the heart of the new Samsung UMPCs then? We think it's a possibility, and it could help solve the battery life issues of the first models, which might well help the struggling platform, and with AMD's support this chip might get a second life yet. µ

L'INQ
Transmeta announcement
AMD to provide CPUs for UMPCs