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Transmeta has begun shipping its second generation Efficeon processors, the TM8800 series.

Using 90-nanometer processes and AntiVirusNX technology, Transmeta claims it's the first low-power x86-based processor to provide hardware support for the antivirus protection enabled by XP's Service Pack 2 (several of AMD's chips also support the SP2 antivirus technology). Transmeta's products need additional software, dubbed LongRun, to enable compatibility with other x86 chips.

Made by Fujitsu at one of its Japanese fabrication facilities, the new Efficeon chips will clock up to 1.6 GHz, and Transmeta said it expects to sample 2-GHz products by the end of 2004. Chip power consumption for a given clock frequency is greatly reduced on the Efficeon TM8800 processor compared with the prior-generation 130nm Efficeon TM8600 processor, the company says.

Transmeta says its Efficeon TM8800 processor is optimized for a wide range of computing applications and new types of devices such as notebooks, ultrapersonal computers (UPCs), tablet PCs, blade PCs and servers, cluster workstations, and fanless media centers.

Systems based on the 90nm Efficeon TM8800 processor will begin shipping this month, starting with a new notebook computer from Sharp and the recently announced Orion Multisystems Cluster Workstation. The company has announced no other OEMs in support of the chip, whose Crusoe launched amid much industry hype in 2000. "The 90nm Efficeon TM8800 gives users the computational power needed for today's high performance devices and applications," says Matthew R. Perry, president and CEO of Transmeta. "The high-performance, energy-efficient architecture of the Efficeon TM8800 promises to enable exciting new products from our customers."