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IBM Cancels Crusoe Laptop
sheckard writes: "News.com reports that IBM has suspended a project geared toward releasing a ThinkPad notebook with a Crusoe processor. This could be a very bad thing for Transmeta, since their IPO is rapidly approaching." The Transmeta IPO is supposed to be on the sixth of November - IBM has been doing work on examining it, but have decided to put off plans for it for the time being.
However, I think that the Transmeta stuff has just gotten out of hand. If this was any other company, they would not get such attention, but simply because it has some affiliation with Linus Torvalds means that people actually care?
Not really. Linux is great, but transmeta... what are they doing for me right now? Not all that much. What will they do for me in the future? Maybe a little, but not all that much again. It's like doing a 30 part series on the little IBM eraser nub pointing device. WE GET IT, WE GET IT, WE GET IT. Low power consumption. We get it. It's worth an article or two, but not 20.
Move along, nothing new to see here, thanks.
Thinkpads are geared towards large corporate purchasers (just try to order an A20p as an individual if you doubt that), so a Crusoe Go/No-Go decision is going to based around the saleability of that product to the suits.
That could mean:
1) Corporate IT wants to stick with the Intel brand name. Good tech don't mean crap if the customers won't plunk down their change.
2) IBM has doubts about the robustness of the chip. Because Thinkpads go into their highest value enterprise accounts, they'll be more picky about compatibility/longevity issues than otherwise. The overall customer relationship here is far more valuable that the profit from a single batch of ThinkPads.
3) Intel or AMD has incented this behaviour by cutting IBM a deal. Remember the bottom line is $$$. IBM is a huge company so the fact that one part is making the chips, or that another portion ponied up vulture capital doesn't mean a thing. Witness IBM PCCo leaving IBM PSP's OS/2 to twist in the wind when the MS OEM agreements came around.
4) Manufacturing bandwidth. They may not have room in their factories to built yet-another ThinkPad variation. Jiminy Crickits... in early June I tried to splurge on a ThinkPad A20p (complete with video capture, 15" LCD and a titanium case) and was given a *LATE OCTOBER* delivery date. Folks, that's 5 months of backlog. I'm sure they'd be filling those orders sooner if they could. (Off-Topic: After a month of waiting I canceled my order and bought a Dell Inspiron 7500 which was on my doorstep in 2 days)
5) Cluelessness. I consider this the least possible... IBM (recently) has been doing an outstanding job of moving technology from the research labs to the customer. The ThinkPad folks have been some of the best at product execution.
-Rob
--Rob
I don't think this will matter too too much for Transmeta right now. They've got a chance to prove themselves with Sony right now, and if kick it hardcore on the outset, they should be fine.
IPO isn't where it all comes down to in the long run anyway. Even if the IPO price is affected by the fact that IBM isn't currently planning on releasing a Crusoe Thinkpad, they'll make there money if they make an impact in the market place. Which is, in my opinion, how it should be anyway.
And in the end, this isn't IBM saying that they will never make a Thinkpad with a Crusoe in it, so all you fans of IBM and Transmeta might yet see all your wishes come true -- that is, if Transmeta can deliver on its promises. This next quarter will prove very pivotal for Transmeta, and I really do hope that they put up some stiff competition in the portable processing market. And Crusoe is just a first product, and is (at least in my opinion) just a taste of what Transmeta and the gang have in store. And in the worst case, at least there is more competition to bring down prices in the short run. But I've gone on long enough for one post, and that's a whole other story...
JDW
I guess they don't care about new technology, but care about the almighty buck and their relationship with Intel.
You can hardly accuse a company that has spend billions developing the PowerPC with Motorola, and spent years manufacturing customer processors for use in RS6000 machines to be scared of Intel.
Much more likely they cannot find any benefits in using Transmeta processors at this point in time, bearing in mind the extremely low margins in low-end kit (i.e. anything under workstation class machines).
I tend to agree that their laptops are not the fastest things in the world, but the agony I get from carrying around a Compaq brick makes me long for a light machine, not a fast one. SuSE doesn't seem to give much of a damn whether it can surf the net at 300MHz or 700MHz!
The Crusoe, I am convinced, is a great processor. Big companies are just incredibly wary of it because it comes from a tiny little company that is iconified by the hero of the open source movement. Given that the higher-ups are less than optomistic about the little guys, regardless how good their products are, this really shouldn't come as much as a surprise.
:-)
Explain: you are convinced it is great why?
1) It relied on vapourware and almost Blair-Witch-esque hype before it was released (remember those "uses Alien Technology" stories kids?!)
2) CPU power consumption is probably one of the lowest consuming elements of a laptop: those screens use the most
3) It has Linus on the payroll! Fantastic: it was already signed off for production when he joined.
Get over it people: it's just another processor. I agree whole-heartedly with it's aims of both code morphing and power saving, but it's nowhere near the revolution we were all promised. And it *was* televised
Actually, no. Heat and power consumption are directly related, lower one and the other is lowered. Think about it: what 'work' is done by the electricity in a microprocessor? From the physics standpoint nothing. It is not converted to light, sound, motion, and the RF is negligible. All of the energy is converted to heat. If you think about it a computer is nothing more than a space heater.
A associate once mentioned the key to miniaturization of consumer devices is heat. The more heat, the larger the chip itself (to transfer heat), the larger the heat sink (to dissipate heat), and the larger the battery (to store the energy to generate the heat). As heat goes down size goes down.