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Computer

CRUSOE PROCESSOR

1. INTRODUCTION

Mobile computing has been the buzzword for quite a long time. Mobile computing devices like laptops, notebook PCs etc are becoming common nowadays. The heart of every PC whether a desktop or mobile PC is the microprocessor. Several microprocessors are available in the market for desktop PCs from companies like Intel, AMD, Cyrix etc. The mobile computing market has never had a microprocessor specifically designed for it. The microprocessors used in mobile PCs are optimized versions of the desktop PC microprocessor.

Mobile computing makes very different demands on processors than desktop computing. Those desktop PC processors consume lots of power, and they get very hot. When you're on the go, a power-hungry processor means you have to pay a price: run out of power before you've finished, or run through the airport with pounds of extra batteries. A hot processor also needs fans to cool it, making the resulting mobile computer bigger, clunkier and noisier. The market will still reject a newly designed microprocessor with low power consumption if the performance is poor. So any attempt in this regard must have a proper 'performance-power' balance to ensure commercial success. A newly designed microprocessor must be fully x86 compatible that is they should run x86 applications just like conventional x86 microprocessors since most of the presently available software has been designed to work on x86 platform.

Crusoe is the new microprocessor, which has been designed specially for the mobile computing market .It has been, designed after considering the above-mentioned constraints. A small Silicon Valley startup company called Transmeta Corp developed this microprocessor.

The concept of Crusoe is well understood from the simple sketch of the processor architecture, called 'amoeba’. In this concept, the x86 architecture is an ill-defined amoeba containing features like segmentation, ASCII arithmetic,...