Slashdot Mirror
Transmeta Confirms Recall
jbischof was the first to tell us that Transmeta has confirmed that they are recalling Crusoe, as we
mentioned earlier. The statements says it's fewer then 300 NEC laptops, so it's not that huge of a deal after all. Of course the egg-on-face factor is still high.
But this is a recall which required less power and required fewer resources than other recalls...
It could have been worse. If Transmeta were more like M$ they'd have shipped several million units before announcing the problem, and then charged you for an "upgrade" to fix the bug. If they were more like Intel they'd just deny that anyone should care, and you'd have to show that you had a good reason for caring before they'd replace the chip.
And the brethren went away edified.
The P3 1.13 GHz recall affected only 200 parts (i.e. less than this Transmeta recall), but that doesn't stop AMD and TMTA stock-holding slashbots from bringing it up on a daily basis.
Plus, consider that this is TMTA's first product: their batting average is 0.000, but Intel's is about 0.950. IMHO, this is a major blemish for TMTA which will take years to overcome, and will greatly dissuade fence-sitting OEM's who were considering using TMTA parts.
A manufacturing defect is still Transmeta's problem: it's a quality control problem. The designer of the CPU writes test vectors to test the chips. If it was indeed a manufacturing problem it means they didn't properly engineer test vectors to screen the chips. Intel's DPM is ludicrously low (500, IIRC), and with 300 defects, Transmeta would have had to ship 600,000 parts to reach Intel's quailty level (somehow I doubt they shipped 600,000 parts).
Well... their stock got beaten down by 25% today, so I would say it has a pretty big effect.
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Sure, recalling 300 units wouldn't be a big deal for a nuts-and-bolts company like Fairchild. But for a company that's relies on buzz as much as Transmeta does, egg on the face is a major deal.
(Thinking that over a little, maybe I'm being too harsh -- I mean, Transmeta is trying to leapfrog Intel, not start yet another Internet pet food company, and they deserve credit for thinking big. Still, they profit tremendously from their high public profile and that's going to hurt them here.)
Completely off topic: Does it seem to other people that Slashdot is shrinking back to its pre-Columbine (pre-post-Columbine?) scale? Except for flamebait articles about the election, most stories are down to ~100-200 +1 posts. It's nice not feeling like if you don't post on a story in the first minute there's no point bothering.
Come to think of it, the continuous real-time dick measuring contest called Advogato.org has turned into a desert, at least in the posting area, and LinuxWorld (which I think is underrated) and Linux Today forums are mostly empty, too. Are we seeing a trend here?
Normally I sae this sort of stuff
Nov. 29, 10:24 AM:
from the screwing-with-carniore dept.
Nov. 29, 3:19 PM:
from the now-thats-a-wierd-thing-to-do dept.
Nov. 29, 4:00 PM:
Possible Crusoe and Recall? (uh, yeah)
And now, Nov. 29, 9:37 PM:
.. to tell us that Transmeta has confirmed that we they are recalling Crusoe .. The statements says its fewer then 300 NEC laptops, so its not that huge of a deal after all ..
This calls for the creation of the CmdrTaco Quality Seal! The first one is given to JeffK! Only awarded to sites with a minimum of spelling and grammar errors.
You might, however, also employ a grammar & spelling nazi.
He could be out of a job if Transmeta doesn't turn things around.
My sister is trying to get out of being a social worker and she can't get another job because she doesn't have Windows or Office 2000 experience.
Let's face it - Linus doesn't either.
I'm willing to put up $500 bucks to help pay the $6000 cost of MCSE training in the event Transmeta folds - how about you guys?
C'mon, we can't leave Linus out in the cold after all he's done for the open source community.
--Shoeboy
String corporateMistake( Corporation corp )
{
if ( OpenSourceCompanies.contains( corp ) ||
corp.employeesLinusT()
)
return "Things will get better";
else
return "Ha Ha " + corp.getName() + " sucks just like MS,"
" this incident is proof positive";
}
The press release makes it sound like a manufacturing defect (it only affected a single batch of chips) rather than a design defect. It doesn't sound like a huge problem. All the companies produce defective chips; they should never make it past quality control.
Compared with Intel's famous fdiv bug which was a design fault and affected all pentiums at that time, this is relatively minor.
I'd say that the biggest loss in this case would be due to the bad publicity that Transmeta has received.
Chris