Torvalds' chip venture sets sail

Transmeta has lifted the lid off its secret microprocessor project, Crusoe, developed with the help of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and the backing of financier George Soros.

The Crusoe family of mobile device microprocessors is designed specifically to bring Web functionality to the wireless community. The principal feature to enable this is by allowing instruction sets to be implemented entirely by software. They will also be fully compatible with the Linux operating system.

Three-quarters of the chip's functions will be carried out by Code Morphing software with the processor doing the remaining quarter. This, the company claims, enables it to reach high-processing speeds at low levels of power consumption.

The first of two chips runs at 400MHz, has 100KB of cache RAM, and is fully x86 compatible. The second, which is built for higher-end laptops runs at 700MHz and stores 400KB of on-chip cache.

More critically the power consumption for both chips is only one watt and the pricing of the chips is a fraction of chips with similar processing speeds shipped by Intel - the 400MHz will sell for around $89 while the 700MHz will go for around $329.

Other chips for the Crusoe range will follow later in the year.