I'm showing my ignorance here but I wouldn't know what a Transmeta cpu is
like if I fell over one. Are they any good? Would I be better off just
looking at AMD or Intel?
Transmeta is purely targeting the very low-power segment of x86 chips,
only for ultra-thin portables, tablet PCs, etc... and they aren't even
doing a very good job at that.
Their performance is no where near that of AMD or Intel chips. The
latest and greatest Transmeta Efficeon chips running at 1.0GHz will
give you about the performance of an old Pentium3 running at 500MHz (a
5+ year old chip these days). A few applications might be a bit
better, but some would also be a bit worse. The power consumption of
these chips is respectable, only about 7W maximum and often down
around 2W of power. For comparison, the top-end of Intel's P4 line
consumes ~100W maximum and about 60W during typical use, so you're
looking at better than an order of magnitude lower power consumption
for the Transmeta chips here, but the P4 really is not designed for
same market at all.
The chips that Transmeta really competes against are Intel's Ultra Low
Voltage Celeron and the VIA C3 processor. The ULV Celeron are the
fastest of the three but has slightly higher power consumption (~7W
max and 4W average, rough estimate). It's also fairly cheap. The VIA
C3 has about the same power consumption as the Transmeta chips,
slightly higher performance and VERY low cost (about 1/2 to 1/3 the
price of Transmeta of Intel's chips). Transmeta offers the lowest
performance and probably the highest price with little more than the
name and some marketing to back it up.
In short, there really is no good reason at all for anyone to ever
consider the Transmeta chips IMO. If you need a chip with the
performance and power characteristics of the Transmeta, the VIA C3
offers the same for a fraction of the cost. Otherwise Intel or AMD
produce MUCH faster chips for cheaper and with only slightly higher
power consumption.
