The Transmeta Crusoe Processor

The Transmeta Crusoe Processor was a totally new and unique processor when it was introduced back in early 2000. It was meant to compete against the likes of Intel and AMD in the mobile space with a major advantage in low power consumption. How did it do this? Through a combination of a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) core and a software engine called "Code Morphing", the Crusoe processor was able to act as an x86 processor and consume very little power. Since it didn't have to implement the x86 instruction set hardware wise, it was able to create a small processor with a low transistor count which aided in it's low power usage.

The major key to the Crusoe processor lies with the Code Morphing architecture which essentially acts as the instruction set interpreter and translator, but in software rather than in hardware. It analyzes the x86 instructions coming in and figures out whether to go ahead and translate/optimize them into the base VLIW instructions or to fetch them from a local cache etc. As you can see, speed increases would be gained when reuse of the cache occurs. Optimizations to the Crusoe processor could then be carried out over time via software upgrades of the Code Morphing software. The actual architecture of the processor becomes fairly efficient especially compared to the likes of the P6 architecture. Here are some pictures that I nabbed from the Transmeta Crusoe website.

In case you wanted another list of specs of the ProGear, check out Transmeta's description of the ProGear at their site.

The Tablet

Enough specifications now - let's take a look at how this tablet feels. Now keep in mind - a great deal of this is very subjective. What does it really mean to be fast or slow? Yes you can compare results by using benchmarks but you also need to keep in mind that runtime optimizations by the Crusoe processor will unfortunately make the processor itself look slower than it actually is. Performing instructions that have a good translation cache locality would definitely improve the performance of this tablet. Unfortunately, that's about all the nice things that I can say about the version of the Crusoe processor sitting in the tablet. By itself, the tablet and using Windows 98SE with it is pretty slow. It honestly felt like running a Pentium 200 MHz. Yes.. a Pentium Processor - the good old P5 line.

However, as some have done on the yahoo groups, you can remove components within Windows 98 SE to speed things up and you'll get a decent speedup in response times though it's still nothing to write home about. However, the real purpose of this tablet (IMHO) is to connect to remote resources and with that idea in mind, I downloaded the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection software for Windows. This allows any Windows machine to connect to a Windows XP Professional with Remote Desktop Enabled. Unfortunately this does not let you connect to older legacy Windows OS's which is a shame. However, there are plenty of other applications out there such as VNC or PCAnywhere that can solve that problem. You can download the Microsoft client at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/rdclientdl.asp
Once I installed and ran the RDP client, it was definitely a major treat to be able to connect to a Windows XP desktop remotely. Using the 802.11b wireless card was flawless and actions tapped on the screen were registered on the remote machines fairly quickly. I must comment that the Microsoft Remote Desktop application, though slim in features, is great in performance. I don't have comparisons with other technologies out there but I have used software packages like PCAnywhere 10.5 and I will take RDP anytime.

Unfortunately ProGear did not include a whole lot of software to play with. There was a nice pivot program which basically let you switch between landscape and portrait mode. It also came with the Windows 98 installation CD - nice but umm one small problem - no CD ROM drive :) Ok no big deal in a LAN environment but it's still a bit funny to think that there's a CD included in the packaging but no CD ROM drive to use it with for the tablet. Yes you can go ahead and buy a USB CD ROM drive and it will probably work just fine.

So Windows 98 was definitely good enough at first but I really wanted a more robust OS installed and through the wonderful people over at the Yahoo groups, I realized that you could install Windows XP Professional on this tablet. Though installing XP would still make the overall system slow, it was comparable to Windows 98 performance results.

Onto Windows XP..

So I went ahead with the upgrade which was definitely a chore. I won't go into details here on how the upgrade was performed. I wrote a thread on it in the Tablet PC forum for those interested in knowing more. It's one of many ways to do this installation. It's important to note that having a USB based keyboard for this tablet can be very, VERY useful. There were a number of problems that were solved using my USB keyboard. And of course, going into the BIOS is not possible without a keyboard around. Here are some BIOS shots.

Main Menu	Advanced Menu	Power Menu

Once XP was installed and all the latest drivers updated, there was one small problem - the multi-directional scroll button stopped working. So far no one has been able to figure out if there are any available drivers for that scroll button under Windows XP. It works under Windows 98 but alas no can do for Windows XP. This isn't too big of a deal for myself but I'm sure some people may find that annoying. However, the single largest annoying problem comes with the fact that Windows XP can not obtain any sort of battery information on the tablet. I've yet to do research on this but it sure does look like the power management subsystems are having trouble with the tablet. Thus this makes using the Tablet a bit precarious under XP since you never really know where you are at with the battery life. However since most of the time I will be connected to a remote desktop, I'm am somewhat OK with the notion that battery metering is gone.

There are some other minor issues under XP such as an occasional disappearance by the sound system (which can be fixed by removing the device under Device Manager and then letting Windows XP find it again after a reboot) and the standby/hibernation problems. If you install the latest Ali drivers, you will find that the standby and hibernation features of XP is disabled. Why? I have no idea but if you don't need the minor speed boosts by the Ali drivers, then go and ahead and stick with the XP drivers for the IDE subsystem.

Windows XP Starting up	Welcome Screen (notice the pivot to Portrait Mode)	Logged into XP using XP's keyboard

Under XP

Once XP was fully installed and running on my ProGear, I immediately tried to optimize system performance by removing all interface enhancements that would really slow my system down. Enhancements such as the sliding menu effects were really not necessary and definite resource drains. Another important optimization is to go into the services section of the administrative folders and disable services which you know you'll probably never use. I turned off things like Auto - Update since I don't think I will need the subsystem to tell me that there's an update available. After all the initial optimizations, I managed to get XP loaded using up 55MB or so. Not too shabby. Performance under XP was reasonable given how slow the Crusoe processor was for this tablet. However as I said before, do remember that system speed picks up a little on repetitive tasks since the s/w and h/w cache kicks into play. For fun, I loaded up Sandra Benchmarks for some speed comparisons with older processors which we haven't seen around in awhile. As you can tell, you probably don't want to use this tablet for number crunching or serious word processing. The benchmarks can be seen on the next page. However, the tablet does perform a decent job as a web browser and email station. However, again, the real charm for this device was remote desktop connection. Since I had Windows XP installed now, RDP worked even more flawlessly. One of the nice things about RDP is the ability for the remote desktop to modify screen sizes to match your screen size ratios. As you can see in the pictures, I've connected to my desktop PC which is at 1280 x 1024 and yet RDP changed ratios to 768 x 1024 of my Portrait Tablet desktop.

Windows XP RDP Client	Connecting to a remote desktop

Remote Desktop on the Tablet - Notice the screen resize to fit the tablet. The original remote desktop was actually 1280 x 1024	Remote Desktop Window shown more clearly

Remote Desktop Connection UI	Remote Desktop on my Tablet

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