Transmeta has been awared a US Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star gong for services to energy efficiency.

The chip maker joins AMD, which won an EPA award earlier this year for its PowerNow! technology and support for DDR SDRAM.

It's the processor producer's LongRun technology that has got the EPA all excited, it seems. LongRun, part of Transmeta's Crusoe CPU, dynamically adjusts Crusoe's clock frequency according to the needs of the application the chip is running.

The EPA also likes Crusoe's code-morphing techonology, which, apart from converting x86 instructions on the fly into Crusoe's native VLIW code, can regulate the CPU's voltage, again saving power.

Says a glowing comment from the EPA's Energy Star product manager, Craig Hershberg: "Transmeta has made a significant, innovative contribution to energy efficiency and power management with the development of the Crusoe microprocessor."

"Transmeta's development of code-morphing technology and LongRun power management has made it possible to drastically reduce the Crusoe microprocessor's power consumption without sacrificing performance," Hersheybar continues.

Not, of course, that Transmeta is actually contributing much to energy conservation in real terms. For all the advantages of LongRun and code morphing, there aren't exactly that many notebooks out there drawing less power out of the mains while their batteries are recharging, or Crusoe-based servers sucking fewer amps while hosting Web sites etc.

Or are there? Says the EPA release: "The EPA also noted that Transmeta's innovative approach to microprocessor design is enabling many Energy Star Partners to meet program energy-efficiency specifications."

That would suggest that there are rather more Crusoe-based systems being developed than we had previously thought. Either that or there really aren't that many Energy Star Partners out there too... ®

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