Transmeta unwraps `code-morphing' chip
Transmeta Corp., perhaps the most secretive startup in Silicon Valley, finally unveiled the technology it has quietly been crafting for the past four-and-half years: a new family of microprocessors designed for mobile Internet computing.
Called Crusoe, the chips are being billed as the first processors to rely on an instruction set that is completely software-based.
The initial products are the 400MHz TM3120 and 700MHz TM5400, which use so-called code morphing technology to translate x86 instructions into the chip's very long instruction words (VLIW), used to run the thousands of applications already written for PC based on Intel processors.
The Transmeta development team includes Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular open source Linux operating system.
A full writeup appears at www.zdnn.com .
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