Transmeta Crusoe Microprocessor
Crusoe is the new microprocessor, which has been designed specially for the mobile computing market .It has been, designed after considering the above-mentioned constraints. A small Silicon Valley startup company called Transmeta Corp developed this microprocessor.
The concept of Crusoe is well understood from the simple sketch of the processor architecture, called 'amoeba’. In this concept, the x86 architecture is an ill-defined amoeba containing features like segmentation, ASCII arithmetic, variable-length instructions etc. Thus Crusoe was conceptualized as a hybrid microprocessor, i.e. it has a software part and a hardware part with the software layer surrounding the hardware unit. The role of software is to act as an emulator to translate x86 binaries into native code at run time. Crusoe is a 128-bit microprocessor fabricated using the CMOS process. The chip's design is based on a technique called VLIW to ensure design simplicity and high performance. The other two technologies using are Code Morphing Software and LongRun Power Management. The crusoe hardware can be changed radically without affecting legacy x86 software: For the initial Transmeta products, models TM3120 and TM5400, the hardware designers opted for minimal space and power.
To design the Crusoe processor chips, the Transmeta engineers did not resort to exotic fabrication processes. Instead they rethought the fundamentals of microprocessor design. Rather than “throwing hardware” at design pblms, they chose an innovative approach that employs a unique combination of hardware and software. Using software to decompose complex instructions into simple atoms and to schedule and optimize the atoms for parallel execution saves millions of logic transistors and cuts power consumption on the order of 60–70% over conventional approaches. Transmeta’s Code Morphing software and fast VLIW hardware, working together, achieve low power consumption without sacrificing high performance for real-world applications.
Although the model TM3120 and model TM5400 are impressive first efforts, the significance of the Transmeta approach to microprocessor design is likely to become more apparent over the next several years. Freed to render their ideas in a combination of hardware and software, and to evolve hardware without breaking legacy code, Transmeta microprocessor designers may produce updated versions in the coming years.
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