Transmeta Unveils X86 Processors For Small Devices

The company said in a statement that its new Crusoe TM5700 and TM5900 processors, at 21 mm by 21 mm, are 50 percent smaller than its other Crusoe processors. Besides being smaller, the new processors are designed to work in devices that don't have cooling fans, the company said.

Specifically, the company said the processors would work well in portable consumer devices, thin clients and what it called "ultra-personal computers." The new processors have speeds as high as 1 GHz and have L2 write-back caches of as much as 512 Kb, the company said.

Transmeta said it already has sampled the chipsets and will make them widely available to manufacturers this month. It also said that it will make available a small form factor motherboard during the current quarter.

The company said that a number of software platform vendors have supported the new chipset including Microsoft's Embedded Devices Group, Phoenix Technologies and Linux systems software vendor MontaVista.

This story courtesy of TechWeb.