Comdex 2002 Wrapup - AMD, NVIDIA & Transmeta

Transmeta shows off their "Banias killer"

Transmeta approached us in the elevator lobby of the Venetian and invited us up to their suite so we could see their "Banias killer."

As most of you know, Banias is Intel's upcoming processor that was designed from the ground-up to be a mobile CPU. The base architecture of Banias is supposed to be a shift back to the Pentium III pipeline but with a number of architectural improvements (e.g. micro-ops fusion). One of the biggest selling points when it comes to Banias is its supposedly very low power operation, while offering very high performance (the launch Banias 1.6GHz will outperform a Pentium 4 1.6GHz).

When it comes to low-power operation, Transmeta's CPUs do have quite a bit to bring to the table, but they've generally been weak performers when compared to Intel's mobile Pentium III. Transmeta gave us a presentation as well as a live demo of what they call their "Banias killer" or their Astro processor.

The Astro processor is a logical evolution of the TM5x00 design and is referred to as the TM8000. Although not specifically mentioned, we can assume that Astro has the same on-die North Bridge architecture as the current Crusoe CPUs, although maybe with a faster memory controller. Technical details on Astro are sparse at best but the major improvements include:

• 256-bit wide instruction bundles (can bundle up to 8 32-bit instructions per clock vs. 4 in the current design)
• Shortened critical paths within the TM5x00 CPU design to provide for higher clock speeds.
• Increased IPC through larger cache and higher execution throughput

The reason that details are scarce at this point is that the CPU will not be in production until Q3-2003, just under a year from now. The CPU is being demonstrated now to give the world an indication that Transmeta will have a Banias competitor, although not until much after the Intel's official launch in Q1.

Despite the fact that the CPU won't be out for another 9 months, Transmeta did have working silicon in a stable enough state to run some preliminary benchmarks. The CPU they demonstrated was running at 1.067GHz as reported by the system's BIOS and they compared it to a mobile Pentium 4 running at 1.80GHz.

The benchmarks weren't performed very scientifically at all; they involved manually timing the start-up of Microsoft Word and PowerPoint as they attempted to open multi-megabyte files. In all cases the Astro was faster than the mobile Pentium 4 however what invalidated the results was the fact that Transmeta outfitted the Astro system with a desktop hard drive and the Pentium 4 laptop had a slow notebook drive. Transmeta attempted to justify the comparison by saying that the desktop hard drive was only an ATA-33 drive but as you all know, peak transfer rates are far from the best gauge of a drive's performance (otherwise ATA-133 drives would have taken off).

There is potential with the Astro platform and by the end of next year we'll have an idea of how well the chip performs, but until then we're just going to have to wait and see. It's too early to call Astro a "Banias killer" especially considering that it will be available 6+ months after Banias' release.