[clug] Transmeta CPUs

[James Macnicol]

	I am pondering yet another laptop upgrade, definitely to
something physically smaller than my Sony Z505.  I have my eye on the
Sony Vaio U3 or Toshiba Libretto L5 however both of these use the
Transmeta TM5800 chip (933MHz for the Sony, 800MHz for the Tosh) and
I'm worried that this is going to be a big performance downgrade
from a 750MHz P-III.  Has anyone on the list spent time using a machine
with a TM5800 and can provide some comments regarding performance?

     There is a new Vaio U101 that has a 600MHz Pentium-M (although they
call it a "Celeron A" for some reason, I think because it might only have
512kB of cache not 1MB) but that's a lot more expensive.

     As far as Linux is concerned, I understand that Transmeta was
going to produce its own version that runs "natively" on the Crusoe
(i.e. without Code Morphing from x86) but this never happened.  Is
this true?



Thanks.


--
James Macnicol
j-macnicol at adfa.edu.au