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Transmeta Starts Shipping 90-Nanometer-Process Efficeon September 10, 2004 Higher Clock Speeds, Win XP SP2 Virus Protection Earlier this month, Transmeta Corp. says, it began limited production shipments of the second generation of its second low-power CPU. While the Efficeon TM8600, successor to Transmeta's Crusoe chip, is manufactured with 0.13-micron process technology, the new Efficeon TM8800 is produced at Fujitsu's 90-nanometer-process Akiruno Advanced Technology Center near Tokyo. The new technology permits not only a die shrink but higher clock speeds; the first TM8800 chips run at 1.6GHz (up from 1.0GHz), and Transmeta says it expects to sample 2.0GHz processors by the end of the year. In addition to the same 256-bit very long instruction word (VLIW) engine with x86 Code Morphing design; 192K of Level 1 and 1MB of Level 2 cache; and integrated memory controller and Northbridge as the first Efficeon, the TM8800 includes what Transmeta calls AntiVirusNX -- hardware support for the "NX bit" or protection against the execution of malicious program code from memory regions meant for data, enabled by Microsoft's new Windows XP Service Pack 2. Transmeta aims the Efficeon TM8800 at battery-thrifty thin and light laptops, fanless media centers, and blade PCs and servers. Sharp has already announced plans to use the new CPU in a Japanese addition to its Actius notebook line, as has Orion Multisystems for a new cluster workstation.