IBM Wary of Crusoe?

Angus writes "VNUnet have just posted a story that IBM is being cautious about the future of Transmeta's Crusoe in production machines. Suggestion is that Intel is still the player for the future of portables." An interesting comment at the end: 'All Intel has to do is cut prices to squeeze transmeta out of the market'

Comments

The road for Crusoe isn't easy

[jht]

With Crusoe, Transmeta is playing in the second-most cutthroat market next to DRAM - the x86 CPU business. At one point, there were a plethora of x86 CPU's on the market. Now there is basically just AMD and Intel (I know Cyrix still exists through Via, but it's in a small niche until proven otherwise). And as much power as mobile chips burn, the other components burn as much or more power in operation, meaning that there will have to be some pretty darn compelling advantages to Crusoe for it to get design wins in traditional laptop systems. This is where Transmeta wants to play.

The caveat to this gloom is that Transmeta's chips can also be used for newer, non-laptop devices that can use different components and lower power budgets than traditional PC laptops. Mobile Linux is a factor here, too - the chips usually deployed in this product space (Motorola Dragonball - Palm, Intel StrongARM - the late Newton, WinCE, and others, Hitachi SH3 - WinCE, and a few other chips, too) have excellent performance and are generally light on power draw, but do not offer x86 compatibility. Transmeta brings that to the table with much less power usage than the AMD or Intel alternatives. This will allow companies to leverage the existing x86 software base and Unix software much easier than other platforms do. The "post-PC" market is where Transmeta will live or die.

The other thing to remember in this market is the cost factor. Intel and AMD already charge low prices for their mobile chipsets. Transmeta isn't trying to compete on a "bang-for-the-buck" basis, because they'll get slaughtered that way. Transmeta can't afford to go up against Intel directly like that, nor can they even afford to take on AMD. The answer is to "hit 'em where they ain't", to paraphrase Wee Willie Keeler, and play for the wireless, appliance, and PDA markets against those specialty chips.

It's definitely do-able, and Transmeta may get a few design wins in the laptop market as well - but any laptop chip sales are almost gravy on top of the appliance market. There's room for another player there - why not Transmeta?

- -Josh Turiel