SANTA CLARA - The Silicon Valley firm that designed Palm's slender Palm V has developed a wireless Internet appliance based on Transmeta's Crusoe microprocessor, Transmeta's CEO David Ditzel said last week.
Ditzel showed slides of the prototype device, designed by Ideo Product Development, during a dinner presentation here sponsored by Microprocessor Report. The "Web slate," as he called it, is about the size of a paperback book, has a wireless Internet connection and, like the Palm, uses handwriting recognition to input data.
The device also features a high-resolution, eight-inch screen for viewing Web pages and DVD movies, a small camera for on-the-road videoconferencing, a global positioning system for navigation, and embedded speakers for playing digital music files, according to information on Ideo's Web site.
The Web slate was designed to be more portable than a laptop and offers a larger viewing screen than a personal digital assistant (PDA), Ideo said. Transmeta commissioned the design to show off the versatility of its new chip. That means Ideo probably won't offer the Web slate commercially, but other manufacturers may sell something similar.
Palo Alto Ideo also had a hand in designing Handspring's Visor PDA.
Internet appliances based on Transmeta's low-power chip could go on sale shortly before midyear, Ditzel said in a brief interview last week.
"The second half of the year is going to be a very busy time," Ditzel said. "We can't answer all the phone calls" from companies who want to use the Crusoe processor in products, he boasted.
Ditzel also showed off a Web tablet from Taiwanese notebook maker Quanta and a similar device called the Day Tripper from S3, which is one of the few companies that has committed to selling Crusoe-based appliances. Those products were shown at Transmeta's launch party in January.
The appliances use Transmeta's TM3120 processor, which is available at speeds of up to 400MHz and runs a mobile version of Linux. The company also offers the TM5400, which runs at up to 700MHz and will power Windows-based notebooks. That chip is being sampled to manufacturers now, and the first Crusoe notebooks should appear in the second half of the year, Ditzel said.
Transmeta stirred up a wealth of hype last year by keeping its product plans tightly under wraps. In January it unveiled its first two Crusoe processors. The chips use a technology called "code morphing," which allows them to run the same x86-type instructions as Intel processors. But, according to Transmeta, code morphing allows them to run the instructions using far less power, which leads to much longer battery life.
Ditzel confessed last night that while the technology may be real the term code morphing has other origins.
"When you go to venture capitalists and tell them you want to do dynamic one-time recompilation to get from one binary to another they kind of go to sleep on you," he said. "We called it code morphing and suddenly everybody wanted to give us money."
The company hasn't released the results of any benchmark tests yet, which makes it difficult to gauge its claims about Crusoe's performance. Ditzel said Transmeta would announce a few benchmark results when the first Crusoe systems start shipping.
Analysts say code morphing isn't quite as revolutionary as Transmeta would have people believe - other companies have developed similar emulation techniques in the past using slightly different approaches. The difference is that Transmeta appears to have been more successful than others, said Keith Diefendorff, senior analyst with MicroDesign Resources, which publishes Microprocessor Report.
Transmeta, in Santa Clara, can be reached at 408-919-3000, or at www.transmeta.com/. MicroDesign Resources is at www.mdronline.com/.
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