Transmeta offers more details on Efficeon core
At the Microprocessor Forum Transmeta officially introduced its new family of mobile processors — TM8000. Initially this Efficeon family will include three chips: TM8600 with 1Mb L2 cache, TM8300 with 512Kb L2 cache and TM8620 (TM8600 in the miniature form-factor). Efficeon chips will appear in volumes already in this quarter and will feature 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 GHz clock speeds.
The new processor core processes 256-bit very long instruction words and can handle up to 8 internal instructions per clock. Of course, the new chip (similar to Crusoe) is controlled by the special software that transforms x86 instructions into VLSI.
Similar to AMD Athlon 64 processors, Efficeon features integrated DDR400 memory controller. Besides, it also has AGP 4X and HyperTransport implemented.
We haven´t seen any results of independent Efficeon tests, however Transmeta claims their internal test results indicated at least parity with Centrino in some tasks; and if you compare processors of the same clock speed, in some cases Efficeon even prevails over Pentium M.
Together with NVIDIA nForce3 Go 120 TM8600 occupies 2066 mm² that enables low-profile PCs. The TM8000 itself is sized 119 mm² at 130nm process technology.
As for the energy consumption, it ranges from 5W to 14W for 1.0 to 1.3 GHz models, respectively. In the standby mode the processor consumes just 0.18W. The second generation expected in H2 2004 with 90nm process will have clock speeds up to 2.0GHz.
In our future publications we´ll provide more details on TM8600 architecture.
Write a comment below. No registration needed!
