Photograph: Marc SimonTransmeta's first notebook CPU, the Crusoe, suffered from a double whammy: It delivered dismal performance and unexceptional battery life. Efficeon, Crusoe's successor, does a significantly better job on both counts.
We tested the first notebook in the United States to use the 1-GHz Efficeon TM8600 chip: the $1499, 2-pound Sharp Actius MM20. In line with Transmeta's predictions, the MM20 performed about 50 percent better in our tests than did its predecessor, the Actius MM10 with a 1-GHz Crusoe TM5800. The MM20's score of 76 on PC WorldBench 4 is still significantly below the scores earned by similar Intel-based ultralight laptops, such as IBM's ultra-low-voltage 1-GHz Pentium M-based ThinkPad X40, which had a 104 mark on our PC WorldBench 4 tests. But the MM20 did provide smooth video and audio playback when we watched a movie via the external DVD/CD-RW drive ($99); it even let us work in the background, although that slowed the video.
The MM20's battery life, in our tests with the $199 extended battery (which brings the weight of the notebook to 2.6 pounds), was an impressive 7 hours, 35 minutes. But the standard battery lasted only 2 hours, 28 minutes--14 minutes less than the MM10's.
The Efficeon improves on Crusoe's performance via a larger 1GB L2 cache, built-in support for DDR400 memory and AGP 4X (Crusoe lacks AGP altogether), and AMD's fast HyperTransport bus technology with throughput up to 1.6GB per second. The new chip also boasts more efficient code-morphing software, which translates standard x86 instructions into ones the chip understands. Later this year Transmeta will launch LongRun2, which should improve battery life even further.
The Efficeon can't yet match Intel's best performers, but die-hard travelers in search of the smallest package and the best battery life for business apps should look at Efficeon-based laptops such as Sharp's.
Ad Choices