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Title: Transmetta Post by: deslok on August 11, 2011, 03:19:58 AM in the spirit of mining with whatever we can has anyone considered using a efficion or crusoe cpu for bitcoin mining? they were lower power chips based on a 128 bit(crusoe) or 256 bit (efficion) vliw arcitecture it should be possible to bypass or take advantage of in some way the "code moprhing" layer that was used to translate x86 instructions into native instructions
Title: Re: Transmetta Post by: MoonShadow on August 11, 2011, 03:26:14 AM I can't imagine that it would be worthwhile, unless someone were going to do it just for the geek cred. Feel free, tho.
Title: Re: Transmetta Post by: Silverpike on August 11, 2011, 05:24:48 AM FYI Transmeta is bankrupt, and their CPUs are no longer produced. I do see quite a number of their CPUs on Ebay however.
The problem here is that Transmeta's actual VLIW format is proprietary, meaning nobody can write code for it natively except Transmeta (which won't happen since they don't exist anymore). The other fundamental issues are: 1. Old architecture, last fabbed at 130nm (slow) 2. Up to 4 parallel instructions per clock. This would make it equivalent to SSE2 in terms of throughput per clock rate. Their VLIW design gives them no advantage here over a modern x86 CPU. Even if you could write your own VLIW code, this thing would be certainly slower than 1MH/s, most likely much slower. |