Slashdot Mirror
Speculation On AMD Buying Transmeta
Nuke Skyjumper writes: "According to a report on CNBC, it appears AMD is interested in purchasing Transmeta. I wonder what the implications for Linus, and in particular, Linux would be?" With the recent agreement between them, some people see them working even more closely together. But there's been a lot of hot air about this before - I think at one point people had been talking about Transmeta buying AMD. But, as always, time will tell.
It will help both of them tremendously(sp?). Transmeta brings in their knowledge of VLIW processors and AMD brings in their high MHz (and low Ghz) processors. Both of these factors are needed to beat Intel and (in the not too distant future) Apple. A 2Ghz, 64bit, VLIW CPU would be very pimp.
Mark Duell
I really don't see how such speculation merits front-page treatment. Slashdot's pro-Transmeta propoganda should have died off as soon as it was clear that Transmeta's chips are not the cure for Microsoft, world hunger, and freedom for all.
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This article only discusses the buyout as a speculation on the part of the author. He is showing agreements between the compaines as a lead for a merger. This is not even news....Just a large editorial on a slow news day....Guess the managing editors were making bets on the Superbowl....:)
I'm guessing if AMD actually does have any real plans to buy Transmeta, it's largest concern is Transmeta's supposed lower power consumption.
There is other technology there they would be interested in, I know... but AMD is doing pretty poorly against Intel in the mobile market, for now anyway.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
I'm interested in buying Transmeta too.
Take Paypal?
I'm no scientist but I would say this would be a bad move for AMD. AMD has been doing an OK job on their own, creating creating chips. They have managed to keep out of the news unlike Intel who rumor has it, may be facing the same role as Microsoft with the Department of Justice.
As for Transmeta, they have their own niche in the market and should stick to their focus, many businesses with strong policies on their business models and focusing on those models do rather well, unlike others who try to carry the world on their shoulders such as Lucent who is getting slightly pounded, possibly from jumping into too many different segments and forgetting their core business model. (sounds correct although I am tired)
How significantly would AMD captive anything in the processor sector buy purchasing Transmeta? Not much, they should save the money for hard times and focus on their own stuff instead of trying to have their cake and eating someone else's.
Home sweet home
"When I was a Buddhist, it drove my parents and friends crazy, but when I am buddha, nobody is upset at all"
Not to mention that AMD already is licensing the most important thing it could get from Transmeta -- the code-morphing tech so that they can simulate their upcoming chips.
If Transmeta had some fab capacity of their own, it might be different, but IBM produces their chips, and I don't think AMD's quite ready to buy IBM. :-)
Maybe in a couple years when AMD has an extra couple billion dollars sitting around and/or Transmeta's stock crashes, but for now, AMD is selling every Athlon they can produce without any help. There's just no good financial or technical reason for AMD to do this right now, not in their current position.
Regarding Transmeta, my company is developing some internet appliances using Crusoe. Maybe you'll not believe me, but the prototype boards are the primary development platform. People are even compiling XFree86 on them!
By the way, am I the first in the world to run Digger under Linux+DOSEMU on Crusoe?
AMD makes fast quality chips for less. The problem is AMD chips runs too hot. people don't want to have to buy a 300W power supply to run a thunderbird. Maybe this speculative "buy-out" will let AMD adapt some Transmeta technology to make their chips run cooler.
My Duron melted my copper heat sink...
I hope this doesn't offend the poster, or any of the slashdot "elders", but I am sick and tired of this type of post.
1. Does anyone really care if a failing, over-hyped company such as transmeta may get bought out?
2. Is anyone else sick of "What will this do to Linux" posts?
3. C'mon people, there are plenty of good stories, and I would like there to be a Senseless speculation and/or Linux fears category.
Every day, it seems, there is a new post, about a big evil corporation with plans to fork linux, or perhaps spoon linux, or perhaps make Linus a job offer...
At least discussion of the MPAA gets me fired up & frustrated with stupid laws.
I urge others to speak-up if they too would like a seperate board/section for these stories.
Please - no offense to the poster, this is about the quality and usefullness of slashdot only.
I survived the hype of survivor.
Transmeta is all vaporware, a couple of well known figures, and a chaos.
But, hey! in 3 years they could bring us another PC chip ;)
Transmeta + Linus != Linux.
Linus has said many times that he's not interested in the commercial parts of Linux, it's just a hobby for him. If AMD were to buy out Transmeta and try to force Linus to put pro-AMD code into the kernel, he'd likely quit Transmeta, or at least tell AMD to go screw themselves. Transmeta has nothing to do with Linux, aside from the fact that one of the people working there happens to ALSO work on Linux in his spare time.
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
All of you people talking about how the DOJ would get involved must be on crack. AMD has less than 25% of the processor market. Transmeta is barely even a blip. The DOJ won't give a rat's arse about them merging.
I know this is not completely on-topic, but I have to say it.
:)
Right now there aren't many processor manufacturers in the whole computer industry (PC, Apple, pda's, web appliances, etc). You have Intel, AMD, Transmeta, Motorola, IBM, Sun, Alpha. I know there are more, but those are the major players atm. If I missed any, feel free to add them to this list.
So what happens when one of them dissapears? Less choice, less competition. And no matter what these companies will promise (saying that they will keep their speed in developing new technology, and keep costs low) it won't happen. Because developement is driven mainly by competition, and not much else.
I lived for a long time in a comunist (now ex-comunist) country, Romania. And I've seen what happened in an economy that lacked any form of competition. In the 1970s, during a brief period of change in politics, the government bought a lot of top of the line technology (cars, computers, and a lot of other high-tech stuff). But only a few years later, things turned to worse, because the president of the time, Ceausescu closed off the trade with the Western Europe and the US. The decision was to run everything within Romania, without any world contact.
Fast forward to the 1990s... The car designs that were bought in 1968, the Renault 12, was still being built, in it's original shape and form (nothing changed on it). The top of the line computers were some 8086 clones. Everything had stagnated, as if for the whole 20-something years that Romania closed off its borders nothing had happened.
Now granted, this is an extreme case, and the chances of this happening in a capitalist society are very slim. But some of these effects can (and do) take place every day. So I really think that AMD buying Transmeta (or the other way around) can be a very bad thing.
Oh, come on. Can you imagine the public outcry if they tried something like that? Not that it would make any difference - Linus has little to do with IA64 support in the kernel. Besides can you see Linus accepting that? Personally I credit him with a bit more integrity than that. It's not like he'd have difficulty finding another job.
AMD-TM
Meta Advanced Devices
Athlon, Duron, Cruson?
can we expect a barrage of silence from AMD now? :)
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I heard a while ago that one of the things Transmeta was actively pursuing was PowerPC emulation.
AMD's volume profits could comfortably absorb the cost of selling the chips at prices competitive with Motorola immediately, and even with the lower-than-average performance of the Transmeta chip, a 1.5-2GHz Code-Morphing Athlon would likely whup any Moto. G3/G4 in non-Altivec benchmarks.
If I were looking for the fastest way to support MacOS 9 (will be important for at least the next year) and MacOS X on the x86 platform, then something pretty similar to a Duron with a Transmeta PPC-emulation layer might just be the way.
Apple have proved they have the marketing department and design group from hell, and an OS (Mac OS X) that needs to pick up serious attention outside the existing Mac market to bring Apple profits up. That means selling lots of machines into the hands of people who have never before owned a Mac.
Not easy when your fastest model runs at 700MHz and costs US$5000 without a monitor.
I don't think i can buy an AMD or Intel chip less than 600MHz at the moment, and Motorola are not going to be able to double their clockspeed this year.
Apples biggest problem currently is MHz... even though it might only perform like a PPC of half the clockspeed, it would be good for Apple to be able to advertise '1.5 GHz Macs'.
Apple could continue to offer Altivec models to the scientific, creative and education industries
while targeting the G3-alike AMD chip at corporate/home users.
It might not encode MPEG-2 in realtime in software, but it'll run MS-Office like a raped ape.
And, sadly, thats all the computer buying public seem to give a shit about these days.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
What would all this do to linux? Not much I'm sure because linux runs all over the place on both Intel and AMD chips. If they said to Linus "You can only develop kernels that work on AMD proc's" (like someone up top said) then people would just diverge from the new updates and do their own right? And wouldn't that just defeat the purpose of linux anyways - to have someone dictate when, where and on what you could run it.
Come on people... If anything it would get a major hardware maker in the linux corner - plus the chips they make at Transmeta are x86 emulated chips.
Hell we could see linux shipping with new pc's that have AMD chips... but i doubt it.
AMD isn't buying Linus.
Oh, and doesn't AMD already have a bigger market share than Intel, I heard that on CNBC like 6 months ago, and people are still talking about them taking charge.
I run an AMD and love it, my 750 Athlon is fast enough to reboot into linux after my roomates run a windows session it doesn't bother me they are still in the dark ages of computing.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I doubt Transmeta's IP is worth anywhere near that. Other people know quite well how to build fast low-power processors or how to create processors with adaptable instruction sets. Besides, the x86 architecture will be getting less and less important over the upcoming years.
Haha. You undermine your own argument. The US has the biggest government of any country, and the largest economy. How come then, since the US government is less limited than in any other country in the world, you imply that people in he US don't live worse lives?
Assigning blame isn't the point of the exercise when the issue is monetarily getting screwed over.
Who was talking about monetarily getting screwed over? I'm talking about *really* getting screwed over-- being shut out from information, being denied needed medical care, being denied insurance coverage you paid for, being poisoned by toxic waste, etc.
Vive le Québec libre, 'sti!
The statistical trends are clear, places where government does most things are poor and the common people have measurably worse lives than in places where government is limited and corporations do most things in society.
Absolute garbage. People in Western Europe have a much better quality of life (Britain excepted as the 51st state anyway) due to the government providing things that corporations wouldn't provide, such as quality universal health care, good quality and cheap public transport and housing for all. No-one has to live in a trailer in Europe for example.
Yeah, I doubt that he'll have much problem. :-) I can only imagine what his resume looks like (not that he'd probably need one).
Seriously, just for starters I imagine IBM would hire him (and the rest of the kernel bigwigs) in a heartbeat, as would Intel, as would AMD, as would Motorola, as would any of the big linux solutions providers, as would any of the national laboratories in several countries (educational or "other"), as would the technical branches of several government's intelligence agencies, etc. etc. etc.
So yeah, I don't think that any of these folks would be out beer money if {Transmeta|VALinux|redHat|whatever} fell over and died tomorrow. ;-)
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Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
AMD is looking for a partner to help finance its third fab (to be completed in 2003 or 2004). Now, they had the same plan for their Dresden fab, which turned out to be a ruse to lower Intel's guard (surprise, nothing but GHz-class Athlons!), but this time, why not merge with Transmeta? They're already cooperating, Transmeta could use part-ownership in a state-of-the-art fab, it'd expand AMD's market into webpads and whatnot, and it might actually push AMD's P/E ratio out of the single digits. Oh yes, and AMD has about $1.3 BILLION in cash on hand, which is a tad more than Transmeta has (cough!).
Yes, this does make more sense for Transmeta than for AMD, but a merger is still plausible. AMD bought NexGen for their cool technology, and wound up with the P3-whomping Athlon. They could do it again.
I'll start off devils advocate, if I may, but I'll meet you in the middle later...
The Transmeta 'code morphing' is not actually that great an intellectual leap! OK, now I've annoyed the fans of it I'll try to pacify them.
It takes a few reasonably well used components - hardware, firmware, and software - and then implements them together without requiring any software component.
I'm sure that the brains behind it were fully aware of the intricacies of :
- Microcode.
I have it from an Motorola engineers mouth that there were 8 different test 68000 implementations that differend only in microcode - one of which would decode x86 instructions (endianness-corrected, of course)!
The x86 of course also having plenty of micro code too (for stuff such as 'REP', 'LOCK' etc.) x386->uops has of course been around for 5 years in itself.
- Emulation:
What did Apple do when they moved over to PPC? Got some UK wizzkids to implement a JIT emulator (rewriting in machine code, so only translated one) for the old 68K code that was already out there.
What did Dec do when they got in bed with Microsoft? Implemented a feedback-optimising
emulator. It runs great, and the feedback is so good it runs better on only the second time round (further improvements are very small, as it's optimised all the most important bits already). This Fx32 emulator/translator/optimiser is _brilliant_. The engineers were rocket scientists.
OK, so Transmeta have rolled it all into one, with the cherry on top being the fact that the self-optimisation is in real-time.
Yes it's cool. Yes it is one of the coolest recent developments. However, don't forget the Motorola/Intel/DEC guys who've done some equally brilliant work in their time.
(Now is not the time to bring management-oriented Intel muck-ups into the argument. Even brilliant engineers produce broken products if the budgets and deadlines and other requirements are unfavourable. So praise where it is due, they do have _some_ good engineers you know...)
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
. . .the biodegradeable "Crouton" processor. With optional cache of bacon bits. . . .
There's a heck of a lot of x86 software floating around out there, so well-performing emulation (in my opinion) will be critical to acceptance by large businesses.
Hemos, you ought to be ashamed. After posting the story this morning with your comments about Linus and Linux in it, and then seeing all the comments about how lame and alarmist it was, you go and change the story, make it look like you're the calm and collected one, and don't even post a note that it's changed?
Did you think people wouldn't notice?
-Todd
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"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
Imagine how powerful Tux would become! Hell, he'd even start showing up on lunch pails ;-)
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