Sony's Unique Tiny Laptop Had a Unique CPU Too
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- Опубліковано 5 тра 2022
- Sony's VAIO computer line had a number of laptop models that were nothing like what the competition offered. But its Japanese-exclusive PCG-U1 and U3 subnotebooks were just as interesting on the inside.
Sources:
PCGA-BP3U battery photos: batt.co.jp/products/detail/2866
"Transmeta debuts Crusoe," InfoWorld, January 24, 2000.
Transmeta Crusoe photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
PC Magazine, November 21, 2000.
Transmeta Crusoe photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"Transmeta chip may hold key for computing's future," Computerworld, January 31, 2000.
"The Truth About Transmeta," Maximum PC, May 2000.
"Troubles for Transmeta," PC Magazine, January 2, 2001.
Compaq TC-1000 series photo: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Comp...
"Transmeta Bets on LongRun2," InfoWorld, August 23, 2004.
"Intel takes on Crusoe with single-watt chips," InfoWorld, June 19, 2000.
Transmeta Efficeon photo: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
"Why Transmeta Failed," Maximum PC, June 2005.
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These sorts of machines are quite useful for field servicing equipment that doesn’t have it’s own display. It doesn’t take much processing power to display a settings list, or flash the firmware of a machine… and being small is a big advantage when you have to haul it around along with a bag of tools.
Great point.
That was the point of regular laptops when they were invented
@@talkysassis Well, the first generations were aimed at business users; not technicians… but as machinery started to incorporate computer-derived control systems, technicians adapted the available portable computers to their work.
And it can run Windows or generic Linux, and therefore most of the software for servicing said equipment. And doesn't require a lot of dongles. Which is two things smartphones fail miserably to provide. That's why I'm a happy owner of GPD WIN.
@@darkwinter6028 That's interestinng and reminds me of what happened with mobile phones in Australia during their introduction in the 90s.
Apparently mobile phones in Australia started out aimed at the business sector, which failed. It ended up being construction workers that became the primary clients as they had a real need to be contacted out on the road or in the middle of a construction site. Your average businessman was ususally stuck behind a desk at the time and ususally relied on a desk phone.
The funny thing is people in the West often like to say the Crusoe failed. But it didn't - in Japan it was highly successful and quite a substantial number of different manufacturers used it, and whilst Western Crusoe-based machines do tend to be rare and hard to find, you can still find tonnes of different options in Japan.
Their first gen was a huge success but they could not keep up and only lasted a few years.
I had an the TC1000 HP/compaq tablet PC powered by a transmeta and have to say I was not very impressed by the power nor the battery life. Next year they offered one with a P3 mobile and was sprier without impacting much the battery life.
Well western people are assuming and arrogant ,what did you expect
except it did fail, both financially and as product offerings, seeing as the curve of performance per watt wasn't any better than their competitors, but overall performance was worse
It got discontinued, sounds like it failed to me.
There were reports the Transmeta CPU would benchmark up to 20% faster on the second run through as the CPU adapted it's x86 emulation. I tested this with Quake on my U1 and sure enough the frame rate improved the second time. I love the black U3, always wanted one.
It’s a shame that wasn’t factored-in. That’s quite common with translation layers. :/
Hi Janus! First of all you make great videos! On transmeta - i have c1mhp. Its a disaster, even back in a day. Very slowwww. However this chip let sony make some great designs. But for me the greatest ones are u50 and ux. First more premium and unique, second more practical
@@kaitlyn__L Even the modern Rosetta 2 is basically same. It just does first run ahead of time so you don't see awful performance first
@@nurullahaksay funny, I was going to bring up how the first Rosetta was bad on the first run, but then I changed my second sentence to be more generic.
I knew Rosetta 2 had a hybrid model involving JIT recompilation and then saving the results to memory, but I was unaware it did a silent first-pass. So that’s neat.
Same thing with WINE and Proton!
Funnily enough, the form factor isn't exactly dead. GPD made the Win Max and that gaming laptop looks quite similar to the PCG-U1. The Win 1 and Win 2 are a bit nicer to type on when held in both hands because they're smaller.
I own a GPD Win 3 that looks like a Vaio UMPC. Something i always wanted
Yea i kind of want one since my smart phone has too many artificial limitations but these days i don't travel much so it would be a waste and i worry about windows lagging out all the time when i want to do something quickly on public transport.
I also have a WIN3, as well as a couple of the older top-end UX handhelds. The WIN3 is definitely the heir apparent to the UX design ethic, I love it.
Also have one, totally pleased by it,even one year later
@@belstar1128 to be honest it is really practical for me,(gpd win max,not gpd win 3)i use it as the main drive,for more than one year never felt like it is slow,
Even if i don't use it that much, every time i do,i noticed the experience in a good way,Dont have to lift a heavy leptop, i just take it from the same place i put my phone to charge,most of the time i would even use the same charger,
It can game nice, trough the battery dies fast this way, just for light tasks ,like video watching ,it has longer screen time than most phones,
I guess the thing i use it the most is video watching, because of the screen stand
The speakers are close to horrible
The VAIO silver and lilac colour scheme and high-quality finish was a breath of fresh air in a boring world of grey laptops - and it still looks striking today.
I had one of the early magnesium VAIO 505 laptops and loved it to bits. Only my ThinkPad came close in the amount of work it did and abuse it took than that little machine.
COLOR*** not cOloUr
That's funny, just recently I was watching a Cathode Ray Dude video about a similar Sony laptop with an integrated camcorder, also making use of the Crusoe CPU. The funny thing is, despite the whole point of that laptop being the camcorder functionality, the CPU was too weak to actually handle video encode which held it back quite a bit. Interesting to see this one also using it.
I literally watched that video yesterday then this drops, spooky
VIAO wad always aimed at making multimedia PC's basically High end workstations and Sony lifestyle systems like Apple computers but cheaper
As crt mentioned. Sony was a company which built things outside the bubble, taking devices to another level.
The overlap between the viewership of CRD and this channel has got to be quite significant.
@@flp322 It's incredible how many other recognizable tech channels I see in the comments of other videos.
You mentioned how hard those software and driver disks are to find, I really hope you imaged those you have there and uploaded them to the Internet archive
100%
I bought a U3 when I was in high school, it cost me most of my savings. I used it for a few months, but ended up selling it because it wasn't fast enough for what I wanted to do. Got my money back when I sold it and was happy to have experienced that little machine's uniqueness.
That CPU has some sorcery built into it, the more you run the same stuff the more it adapts and gets better at it, all while consuming much less power since it has less transistors.
Having grown up only seeing Intel and AMD it is very interesting to me seeing other x86 CPUs like the Cyrix, Transmeta and VIA. I suspect the same would be true for younger people and graphic card manufacturers.
I will say having worked on Cyrix machines it had potential to be right on par with AMD in the 90's, but VIA never stood a chance on anything but really low power draw, as their chips both CPU, and IGPU were really slow with bad driver support, and not even a low resource Linux distro like Puppy could help them, as I owned a few VIA C7 based motherboards I put into service with my church in he mid 00's, and some Everex VIA C7 based laptops I bought for nieces, and nephews as gifts.
@@CommodoreFan64 most of VIA chips were based on the Winchip, not Cyrix.
@@Voidsworn Trust me, I'm well aware of that, and read my comment again, as I never said VIA was based on Cyrix, just that Cyrix had potential, and that VIA was over promised hot garbage, with their only advantage being power draw.
@@CommodoreFan64 my bad. I read more into that than was there. :)
Linus Torvalds worked for Transmeta for a while.
I owned a PCG-U3 back in the day. This series was something else entirely. Exotic, extremely cute, with a crazy good display. I miss the times when such creativity was allowed. Thank you for this review which took me back !
可愛いね？
@@MaoRatto とてもかわいい ：）
such creativity was allowed ? Artistic skills you do, apple is what you need
Forget the Windows crap you need ! Demand a better solution = apple !
Apple suck
I remember being able to estimate a CPU's clock speed by how many FPS that 'flying windows' screensaver ran at. 👍😆
I love this videos about old and not common computers, great channel!
Japanese tech in the 80s and 90s was the best part of our timeline.
I can imagine Japanese salary men on the Shinkansen getting work done between the grind.
For sure, even the early 2000s had that spark if only a less so than the 90's.
The western world never understood how far ahead they were for their time unfortunately, very few bleeding edge Japanese electronics actually got exported here
Japan bubble era. Since 2000's they were slowly overtook by Korean counterpart and then American based company. Today, china is beating Japan with robot vacuum tech and smartphone
Yeah it was great envying what I wish we had in USA lol
I am certainly glad there's companies out there that still try and make these things like GPD the packet three has been awesome brings back memories of the various miniature devices I saw along the way that I could never afford.
Oh! A friend of mine bought one in Japan. At its time, it was amazing to see such small laptop running WinXP and with so many options!
Yes those were great times for micro laptops. I remember Casio Fiva also using similar type low-power CPUs. But my favourite will always be Fujitsu mini laptops, they don’t have that sticky rubber coatings or the crack screen like Sony laptops after prolonged storage.
This is what I miss the most from the late 90s/early 00s... Originality. I imagine having a desing like that, with a modern hardware, that would be dope
I wanted to do a video on the Transmeta processors as I've always been obsessed with them. But plans to make a video didn't pan out. Great video!
Used to have something similar in size. It's great for stuffing behind your DM screen for D&D. 😁
I was surprised to hear no mention of Linus Torvalds, the most famous employee of Transmeta. I still remember him being quoted as having said: "When we're done you're going to want one."
I worked for Transmeta from 2000 to 2002. It was an exciting time for sure. One thing the CEO pushed was that these systems weren't intended to be desktop replacements. Instead, they were meant as portable companions to a desktop PC, and never meant to be speed demons. Some of the hardware that used the processor was *very* cool though. I'm glad to have been employed there at the time.
Another example of amazing consumer technology sold only in Japan. I vaguely remember Transmeta and their Crusoe CPUs.
You'd appreciate a thumbs up would you? Well your down right getting one. This channel is quickly becoming my favourite for retro tech up there with LGR and Techmoan.
Check out cathode Ray dude
Will do. Thank you buddy
You're, not your.
After watching this great video, now my new favorite channel also!
I really enjoy watching your videos. Keep up the great work!
This is nice! I had a Flybook Dialogue with a 1Ghz Transmeta Crusoe cpu and a few years ago I bought it once again for some retro gaming.
oh my, what memories! I had a U1 when I used to travel to Japan often for work between 2001-2011. I bought a U1, and then later a U50 and later still a UX50 all when they were new during my years working over there. As much as I loved them for their beyond cool gadget factor, the practicalities of actually using them always eventually came to the fore, and I'd move back to using a more normal laptop. I remember sitting in an office using the U1 to write my reports to my boss. My colleagues would take great pleasure on teasing me over just how tiny my little machine was (ahem).... I remember a colleague sending me an email where he had purposely set the font size as large as he could. When I opened it on the U1, even just a single letter would fill the screen. Everyone thought this was pretty hilarious, and indeed it was :-) I gave soooo much money to Sony (and to Yodobashi Camera) during my years in Japan. Great memories (lighter wallet). Fantastic video, thank you for the memories! I don't have the U1 anymore, I think I sold it to a friend back when it was still quite new. The U50 and UX50 I think I still have somewhere though. No idea if they still work, but I should try!
I remember when these Sub notebooks came out. I wanted one SO BAD! The Toshiba Libretto and Sony Vaio P series were so cool! I loved anything with a tiny color LCD and full keyboard like the the LG Phenom which ran win CE. I ended up scoring a like new HP Omnibook 800 Subnotebook and a Fujitsu Stylistic 2300 tablet pc off ebay in the early 2000's that I still have in my collection.
We needed ARM for this, and not Microsoft !
In Japan in the 2000s, notebook PCs with a Crusoe were common, so I was surprised to find that they were not common in other countries.
Mini disk, Japan did do weird needs .....
High End Palm system, lol !
Only apple is able to do this
I loved the U1 for it's colors and look. It really sings to me and I'd love to have one in a display in my collection. :3
The Transmeta Crusoe chips. I remember the hype for them before they were released. I was working as a service supervisor & later service manager of a laptop repair depo in the 2000's and I remember talking to several of our corporate clients about the Transmeta chips. The low power & battery life claims had them interested, especially for companies that a very mobile work force like sales reps as one example but the disappointing performance results quelled much of that interest.
IMO the best thing that Transmeta brought to the table is it forced Intel and to a lesser degree AMD to focus more on power saving features in their mobile CPUs. The Pentium 4's power issues also helped this along greatly! It also didn't hurt Transmeta that a number of laptop OEMs in the late 90s and early 2000s had tried to stuff a desktop CPU into a few models of their laptops, usually with less than stellar results.
I can still remember the Toshiba Satellite 5005 or 5105 that had a desktop P3 1.13 ghz CPU in it. Sure the laptop was very fast for it's time, but the battery life on it was almost non-existent. The machine ran really hot and had a noisy fan. And if the heatsink wasn't properly cleaned often (which most home users didn't do!) the machine would overheat and either tank performance or shut off entirely. The issue was so bad that I think Toshiba had to extend the warranty on that model for an extra 6-18 months due to how often that happened. That's just one example but there were several others back then.
The introduction of the Pentium M really sealed the fate of Transmeta when laptops with those chips were released in 2003. A Pentium M based laptop would easily keep up with a laptop with a mobile P4 CPU running 1000Mhz faster than the Pentium M machine and do it with better battery life! The Pentium M morphed into the Core Solo, then Core Duo and was refined into the desktop/mobile Core 2 Duo & Quad chips that we all know and loved back then.
I've never heard of a Crusoe CPU and MicroDIMM for RAM until now. Thank you Colin I sure learned somethings new here.
This was a cool computer that I had never heard of! Thanks for the video!
Hey Colin. Love your videos hope you have a great day!
Yea those 1.8 ide drives are slower than molasses in a Chicago winter compared to everything else of the period. One can get an msata adapter to replace the old drive if desired.
I wish we were still building machines like that, or at least with that old Sony industrial design language. I find it so appealing. Great review as usual. Highlight of my morning so far.
VAIO videos are such a delight! I miss them so much.
6:35 This is how all modern Intel and AMD CPUs work like as well. Internally they are RISC, but they have an x86 front-end.
Would love to see you repairing the screen on the U3 and maybe seeing if there's upgrades you can do to them.
Congratulations 🎉
to 300k subs!
You've earned it!
Another fine video, sir!
It still astounds me just how fast PC tech moved at this time: only 5 years previous to this in 1996 retails stores were still selling 100MHz Pentium 1 machines with as little as 8mb RAM and 1mb VRAM and 500mb HDDs. This thing was a SUBNOTE with specs that were light years away, even with an underpowered CPU for the time. Just unreal.
Hey! Just watched Cathode Ray Dude's vid of the Crusoe-based VAIO and here's another one of these. Along with those media-center PCs and all sorts of weird things, VAIO sure was something else.
I had high hopes for that CPU. I remember seeing it used in wearable computers. Big advantage was that it didn't get hot in wearable or portable devices.
I love these ultra compact PC form factors.
True, working with these is somewhat painful and impossible but to think that we can have a computer the size of a GameBoy always stuck with me.
The forthcoming GPD Win Max 2 is effectively the modern equivalent to this, complete with a handheld form factor. Check it out!
Sony’s infatuation of the time with the Spider-Man font continues…
The fact they have the 4-pin FireWire with a separate DC jack next to it makes me wonder why they didn’t just put the 6-pin connector… it’s about as wide and only slightly taller. Oh well.
Very interesting design.
It’s Sony being Sony, they trademarked the 4 pin FireWire as I.LINK and acted like it was theirs even though it was compatible with the 6 pin. Putting the 6 pin in would make too much sense for the company that tried to jam Memorystick down our throats!
I don't think Sony themselves know why they did that, Lolz.
The Sony Style
Yea the marketing for the spider man movies from the 2000s is burned into my brain i remember seeing a trailer for it online it was so pixelated and choppy it was so funny.
I never had such device, never even heard of it, but this video somehow hit me with nostalgia like a truck.
wow! glad to see the pcg-u1!! I used to play 'ultima online' with this small pc for easyuo scripting during my bedtime almost 25 years ago!
I had one of these. The Vaio PCG-U3. It was amazin piece of tech. i still have the original software somewhere. And some pics too.
what a charming little PC, thank you for showing it. 😍
I do miss the days when Sony made laptops. Everyone talks about how they make the PlayStation and all sorts of studio equipment, but they did make computers and other media devices. In fact, the first biggest commercial success was the first transistor radio.
Around 2004 a college professor of mine who also the creator of Kid Pix, has one of these variants of sub laptops from Sony. In the days of iPods and lampshade iMacs, it still exotic to see in the wild.
I sometimes wonder if the Crusoe would fare better today. With ARM becoming more popular and RISC-V on the horizon, a processor that could run a number of instruction sets might become quite useful.
this is back in a time when Sony was trying with their hardware other than their game console. I still have VAIO laptop with Vista. I actually loved it.
Oh wow, I used to have that little gadget back then. It was handy when commuting in train while web browsing.
Wow i totally forgot about the crusoe cpu's, i remember it was a big deal when it launched but never took off.
I would recommend posting the drivers somewhere online for archive as I know a lot of other UA-camrs have had difficulty finding drivers for other Sony products
great video - I remember reading about these way back in Sony's golden age - ahh memories!
Thank you for the video.
I've had a few Transmeta machines over the years, a Sony "PictureBook" PCG-C1VN (that I owned, briefly), and a Compaq TC1000 (that was supplied by my work), they both really were hot garbage in performance terms, but battery life was admittedly pretty good (more so on the Compaq which had a much larger battery). They were acceptable performance for light office work which was definitely Compaq's target market, but Sony definitely pushed multimedia uses more, and they really fell flat there. I kinda wish I had tried to buy out the TC1000 when my work retired it, I did grab a later TC1100 which is the same form factor but Intel based.
Yep those Transmeta chips were truly awful.
That powermate Eco looked awesome wow.
I bought one of these (PCG-U3) to replace my 400MHz C1 and honestly it wasn't much faster lol. It was smaller though, I do need to fix the hook on it that closes it since it's broke on mine so I have to manually turn off the screen with a program. The scroll wheel was definitely one of my favourite features though, I was disappointed the new Picturebook series didn't have one but I got one of those anyway.
I love your videos, here from Brazil :)
@1:35 I'm like 90% sure you could invert the mouse click functions using the regular settings. If not Auto Hotkey will definitely work.
Reminds me of my teeny tiny Sharp Zaurus. It was even smaller and had a touch screen - which compensated a little bit for the terrible "keyboard". I thought it was an amazing bit of technology which worked great as a pocket sized terminal for working in data centres on my regular visits to fix our servers.
One thing about computers or computing in general at the time was the innovation and excitement. We rarely see this in the PC world. We also have a lot less peripherals to choose from.
Looks a little smaller, but thicker then the Atari ST Book, with a similar pointer device, though that came out in 1991 and as there were only around 1100 ever made, are hard to find today (but had features that are missing from todays laptops that could and should be useful!).
Fascinating little machine here though, I know a few people who would have loved to have one of these back in it’s day.
Have you looked into the Sony Vaio UX series. I remember seeing one in a Staples and thinking, "That tiny thing is a full-on computer?!"
This is actually a cool idea, an updated model with swappable mouse and click ports would be neat
we came full circle in the end with tablets with socs and keyboards. this is a very cool looking laptop. wonder if parts could be adpated
Your videos make me go retro again...hell no plz!!
Just found your channel, and like a lot. Very nice comments and relaxing voice. English is not my mother language, but I can understand everything you say.
Thx for good videos.
More VAIO Stuff? man, quite I had some flashbacks with the Sony VAIO back in late 2000's.
Hi Collins, you need to archive this recovery cd's ! Otherwise good video, as always.
Hi Colin 👍 I have a U3 with OK screen that I will be glad to give you or swap for something of equal value if you are interested 👍
Looks so cool!
The Crusoe was all about moving the instruction scheduling from hardware to software. The idea was that if you aren't lighting up transistors to handle out of order execution in hardware that you might be able to beat it at power consumption in software.
20 yrs ago, we at work received tiny sony laptops that were touchscreen too. Cool little gadgets that came with a portable floppy drive.
The best thing about them was that they were free - donated to our it recycling company
I have the sequel to this, the PCG-U101. Amazing little laptops
Neat! I have a PCG-U3 I should document.
I loved my Sony Vaio U101 - the later version of this and with a custom Celeron 600Mhz at the time. Really regretted selling it and was so good for its time.
Hah! I still have the Sony external DVD and CD drives (at 10:04) that I bought with my PCG-Z505. 20+ years old and they still work. Back then, my co-worker bought a PCG-C1VE and he used it for programming. Worked well on his commute too so I heard.
They were very useful for data entry and calculations.
A lab tool or field device.
I half expected a “when computers were fun” things like Mr Mobile at the end
The video port isn't specific to these computers. It's called Mini VGA and many apple computers sold between 2001-2005 used it as well. Ive used that sony adapter on an imac g4 and emac, and ive used the apple branded one on a sony picturebook.
The Crusoe was very interesting. VLIW wasn't used much in desktop CPUs, but outside of that saw some use. Like in Radeon HD 2000-4000 cards or in a modified form in Intel's X64 Itanium chips.
And the possibility to add instruction extensions per update could make them long lived. In theory.
Very good. Nice stuff ok Review congratulaciones
Slightly later there were also the JVC Mini Note laptops using Intel ultra low voltage variants of the Pentium III. I bought one as a student 2004 and loved it. It already had WiFi and I upgraded it to 512MB. Though you had to compromise on the keyboard, if you got used to it wasn’t that bad. It was king when giving presentations or travel abroad. I used it for years and sold it a couple of years ago to a collector for a 100 bugs while still working including the batteries.
Really interesting stuff here.
The emulation capability of the Crusoe makes me think of what is said about M1 chips from Apple, acording to Anaconda developers, it is believed M1 chips can emulate code instructions from x64 and then translate them to ARM architecture. So story repeats but now it seams that it worked very well.
ARM was always the better solution, Windows was always the best crap people bought ......
Love the look of that laptop
I remember all those articles talking about Transmeta processors and how they weren't exactly up to snuff compared to other CPUs but they were great for battery life in highly portable form factors (at the time) and found these Sony machines to be pretty good. I almost bought one despite the high price but I was still firmly in the Pentium camp for all things laptop and Pentium or Athlon on the desktop side of things. Not sure if you're familiar with an old NYC based shop called J&R Computer World but they sold these machines as well as other stuff like imported high cell phones and Palmtops that ran on Intel Pentium III and Core Duo processors (i forget the exact name but they were pretty well known for being unique) as well as the usual tech fare.
It seems somewhat weird they were used at the time, even the Pentium 3 had mobile models that used less than 10W TDP. When running more slowly to equate to a Transmeta it seems likely it didn't use any more power anyway.
Presumably there were other considerations such as form factor, other than just pure power consumption.
Via C3 were also around, th 667MHz model for example had a TDP of 2.5W. It seems that even the weak Via chips were considerably faster at the same clock speeds, in most situations.
And then something like electric dictionary came out, was very popular in 2000s among students. I had one and still keep it, mainly used for the built in dictionary, some simple learning program, videos, songs and some built in simple game. Size about a small notepad maybe 4x6 inches.
Damn brings back memories.
Nice video and nice laptop. I hope you can fix it and record it
I still have one of these somewhere. Back in the day it had enough power to play me videos (SD divx of course) on a very very very long flight. I simply loved it. Interestingly I couldn’t find any OS to run faster than WinNT (or was it 2000?) - tried all them lightweight linuxes, but no - windows worked the best.
I have a Thinclient based on the Transmeta Crusoe that I use for tinkering around with WinXP programs and as my Winamp music player. I would argue that for its time, the Crusoe was a very good CPU, especially considering how little power it uses. It would have been great if they had survived longer in the market, but in the end Intel copyed many of transmeta's technology and things moved on
I hope you can fix the screen on the other one I would love another video on them! I always wanted one of those...
Sony VAIO was a cool ass brand in general. They cranked out some neat gadgets.
Sony's VAIO laptops up until like 2013ish or so were some of the most gorgeous laptops ever!
Is that special video adapter port not just mini-VGA? I have an old iBook that uses that for video out, the connector looks identical!
I wonder if one could upgrade this in the same way that you do with the iPod iflash. Id like to see what that would change
I absolutely love that keyboard font hahaha