by LUKAS HAUSER
I.D. Magazine, May 2000
Intel has tried its darnedest to market the perennially unsexy internal processor. Upstart chipmaker Transmeta, on the other hand, hopes you’ll consider the sleek appeal of its new processor, Crusoe. Rather than make the processor bigger and more complex to improve performance, Transmeta
handles such complexities in software, leaving the chip flexible and svelte. (It runs at one-tenth the power of an Intel chip and, like Apple’s G3, doesn’t need a fan.) With comparable speed to (and compatibility with) today’s computer architectures, it’s likely that Crusoe will spawn a whole new class of devices. “Cellular phones have gotten smaller over time,” says Ed McKernan, Transmeta’s marketing chief, “but with laptop computers no such evolution has occurred.”
With Crusoe, Transmeta is attempting to steer that evolution. To do so, the company hired IDEO in Palo Alto to engineer the WebSlate (pictured above) – a versatile, one-pound, handheld computer concept the size of a DVD disc with a full-resolution, eight-inch LCD display, DVD drive and built-in USB ports. “It’s a Mr. Potato Head type of device,” says McKernan. “You plug in what you want.”
Another thin client is already being produced by Taiwan’s Quanta. This “Webpad” is a larger, wall-mountable version with wireless networking, a Linux operating system and a built-in browser.
Crusoe’s low power drain gives designers and engineers new freedom. “Computer companies have to go back and think about how they designed their computers,” McKernan says. “It didn’t matter how much power other components used because the processor used so much. We’ve flipped that.” Intel: outside.