Re: [SLUG] Crusoe Processor

From: Ronan Heffernan (ronan@iotcorp.com)
Date: Fri Aug 30 2002 - 08:35:25 EDT


bpreece1@tampabay.rr.com wrote:
> My Question is does any company right now produce a mother board that will
> support the Transmeta Processor for clone pc's? Also what is the cost ans
> where can one obtain a Cursoe Processor.
>
> Also tell me that this is a joke
> http://www.transmeta.com/developers/devkit.html $995.00
> Just for MotherBoard and Cpu only at 800mhz?
>
> For $335.00 I can build a dual Athlon Xp 1600 MotherBoard and Cpu's .
>
> Unless things change the prices will kill the Cursoe.
>
> I thought when the Curose was being developed it was price and performance
> that was suppose to make this thing cheap. How can one justify 3 times the
> cost of the dual xp and motherboard?
> >
>

Bill-
    That is a good price for such a powerful devkit. That would be a
horrible price for a production-unit, but Transmeta is selling these
(probably at a loss), to the engineers who work at OEMs. They will
probably sell only a couple of thousand? This devkit is also unusually
full-featured, if you think that the Crusoe chip is going to be more of
an embedded-chip than a PC-chip (TiVO or iPaq, not ThinkPad). In the
words of Neal Stephenson,

    "Really the only way to make hardware cheap is to punch out an
incredible number of copies of it, so that the unit cost eventually
drops. For reasons already explained, Apple had no desire to see the
cost of hardware drop. The only reason Torvalds had cheap hardware was
Microsoft."

--ronan



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