Dave Ditzel Transmeta CEO - "there are lies, damn lies and benchmarks"
This section is intended to give some sort of performance indicator for the Crusoe processor. As no chips are available to the general public, I have been unable to find any benchmarks for the Crusoe processor other than the benchmarks from Transmeta. I think that it would be wise to take these benchmarks "with a pinch of salt" because it is Transmeta's business to sell the Crusoe. An issue that could be had with these benchmarks is that they compare the Crusoe with the Mobile Intel Pentium III processor; this is unfortunate considering that our investigation is concerned with the Apple G4. It would be less of a problem if the benchmarks were more industry standard such as the SPEC benchmarking suite.
Transmeta think that power consumption should be considered in the benchmarks for mobile computers. They want to standardise a new set of mobile platform benchmarks that will incorporate power consumption along with the more pure performance metrics that are currently industry standard. For this purpose the benchmarks that they use to indicate the relative performance of the Crusoe are; Workload Completion Rate (WCR) and Workload Completion Efficiency (WCE).
Workload Completion Rate is a method that assesses the throughput of a processor. What happens is that a system is set a series of tasks and the quicker it finishes them, the faster that system is said to be. This type of benchmark is good when the tasks chosen for it are true to life and correctly simulate the way a user will use a system. Unfortunately this ideal is rarely achieved and so the tasks are usually passive: something like MPEG video playback is commonly used. The formula that is used for WCR is:
WCR = (Mobile Workload Completed) / (Time to Complete Workload)
The unit used is workload units per hour. In this metric a higher rating for a processor is better than a lower one.
Workload Completion Efficiency is a ratio of power consumption and workload completion. This is used by Transmeta to give an indication of how efficient a processor is. The formula for WCE is:
WCE = (Mobile Workload Completed) / (Energy Consumed to Complete Workload)
The unit used is workload units per Watt-hour with a higher rating indicating a more efficient processor. This metric should be used in conjunction with WCR to give a more complete picture of a system's performance.
To conclude, some measurements that have been made by Transmeta:
As expected the Crusoe stays with the Pentium III in the pure performance
metric, and then pulls away when power consumption is taken into consideration.
