Transmeta Corporation today announced that it has received first silicon for its Crusoe TM5800 processor with new, proprietary technologies that enable the company’s current and future microprocessors to increase security for wireless computing, protect sensitive data, deter intellectual property theft and deliver tamper-resistant, x86 storage environments.

Due to the architecture of Transmeta’s Crusoe processors and their Code Morphing software, the company is quite easy to implement different new features with their CPUs. As a result, Crusoe TM5800 may become the first x86-compatible processor with embedded security capabilities.

Transmeta’s new security technologies are planned for customer availability in the second half of 2003. These technologies include the following:

• Secure Hidden Storage - Providing secure storage of certificates and keys used for the authentication or encryption of confidential data for wired and wireless transmissions is a critical challenge facing the computer industry and end users. The storage of such information must be tamper-resistant. Current solutions use external components and increase design complexity, system space requirements and cost. Transmeta’s new security technologies will provide interfaces to the Crusoe architecture that enable both runtime and persistent, secure storage of certificates, keys, and eventually, other confidential information. These storage facilities are within the Crusoe architecture and thus invisible to the x86 space, representing the ultimate tamper-resistant environment.
• Encryption Acceleration - Transmeta’s hardware support for DES, DES-X and Triple-DES is designed to accelerate security applications such as file and disk data encryption and the Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) algorithm commonly used in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to secure both wired and wireless data transmissions. Transmeta will provide interfaces to this hardware encryption engine via cryptographic instructions that are an extension to the x86 instruction set architecture. Named the Transmeta Security Extensions (TSX), these instructions will support key preparation and the DES, DES-X and Triple-DES ciphers. TSX instructions allow programmers to leverage Transmeta’s encryption acceleration hardware for increased performance when protecting data.
• Architectural Flexibility - With its software driven architecture, Transmeta’s Crusoe processors are adaptable to the ever-changing security landscape. The company’s approach to implementing security features can be easily extended to support the newest encryption algorithms as they become ratified by the technology industry. The technology for providing secure data storage that is invisible to the x86 space can also be extended to hide the operations on such data and could in the future hide entire algorithms and intellectual property from the x86 world.

It is great that Transmeta manages to implement these features even in the current TM5800. But what about Astro chip? Based on the information about it, I should admit that it is far more competitive compared to predecessor and its sucessful launch is a critical task for Transmeta.