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.

Comments

Interesting, but not likely...

[Ixnert]

This isn't going to happen -- not now, at any rate. Transmeta's market cap is almost half of AMD's; that's a huge amount of money that AMD could better put to use building more fab capacity to continue chipping away at Intel.

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.

Re:Interesting, but not likely...

[helarno]

You don't have to buy Transmeta using cold hard cash. A pure-stock purchase is possible (though that starts moving more towards a merger,) or a stock/cash hybrid.

I wouldn't worry about Linus.

[BlowCat]

He'll find a better job, that's for sure.

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?

Re:I wouldn't worry about Linus.

[Dust Puppy]

> It'd be very nice if you'd give me a hint on how to get it running under DOSEMU

I can do much better than that. The full source code to Digger is available at http://www.digger.org and has been ported to Unix using the SDL library. I think the "remastered" DOS version has been known to work under DOSEMU, but without sound.

Tired of Linux Stories, and /. Rumors

[noahbagels]

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.

I think theres a mistake here

[GrandCow]

A lot of people seem to be confused...

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.

Re:Won't happen...

[RedWizzard]

C'mon now ppl, how many times have you heard this kind of thing before..??

Yeah, last time the rumor was Nvidia buying 3dfx.

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.

Less competition

[c.r.o.c.o]

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.

Re:Less competition

[dbrutus]

While you are generally correct in your analysis of Romania, you are missing a few things.

Government action is a special case of non-competition. When Ceausescu wanted to stop something from happening, lots of people with guns, poisons, and other instruments of violence went into motion. In a corporate world, this doesn't generally happen. You *can* have corporations rent or hire governments to do the violence for them but if you have a decent constitution and a limited government, the amount of violence on sale is really quite limited. Free elections also tend to make it essential that such deals remain unpublicized.

Getting back to the chip market, Transmeta was formed as a startup around 5 years ago because somebody got a bright idea and a lot of bright people bored with the existing chip companies joined him to make it work. Nothing is stopping that process from repeating an infinite number of times except for a lack of imagination on the part of hardware engineers. As long as the process of forming new startups continues to be available, your nightmare scenario won't happen or won't happen for long.

Another romanian on slashdot
DB

Re:Less competition

[RedWizzard]

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. :)

I'll add MIPS, Hitachi, and VIA (Cyrix), plus Samsung (used to?) make Alpha processors. Some of these companies aren't doing too well, of course.

So what happens when one of them dissapears? Less choice, less competition.

Sure, but when you look at that list and compare it to other industries it look pretty healthy. For example, the oil industry: even aside from the whole OPEC cartel thing, there are only about 4-6 major companies, at least where I live, and they obviously price-fix. Many regions have telecommunications monopolies, either real or partial. Lots of utilities are like that, too.

The processor industry, on the other hand, is one of the most competitive that exist. That's why Moore's Law continues to apply. Now I agree that the loss of choice is a bad thing, but you got to keep perspective. Transmeta is insignificantly small in the processor marketplace, despite the hype and their market cap. Frankly I think the loss of 3dfx is more concerning.

Re:AMD's interest in Transmeta...

[god_of_the_machine]

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.

Don't get me wrong... I think that the power consumption of the Transmeta chips would be great for something like the Athlon... but the real kicker would be code morphing for the Sledgehammer. Everybody knows the trouble that Intel has had with the Itanium x86 emulation... and AMD wants to correct that ASAP, especially with the 32bit-64bit hybrid that they have planned.

An added bonus: the combination of the two companies would be so large that Microsoft could not afford to ignore supporting it with their 64-bit OS (which they have not yet committed to for the Sledgehammer). And I don't care what you think about Microsoft, but they are DAMN important to much of the IT world.

-rt-

Advanced Meta Devices

[CarrotLord]

TransAM Devices

AMD-TM

Meta Advanced Devices

Athlon, Duron, Cruson?

can we expect a barrage of silence from AMD now? :)

rr

Transmeta PowerPC emulation?

[ikekrull]

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.

Re:Transmeta PowerPC emulation?

[VAXman]

PPC isn't even really a 'braniac' chip. The HPPA chips are the real brainiacs, and they out-perform x86 chips at numerical simulations even with a 4:1 clock ratio. Look at the SPEC/FP. Until recently HPPA were the only systems to come anywhere near Alpha performance (they beat it occasionally).

This is incorrect. The 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 gets a SPECfp2000 score of 549, handily beating the fastest HPPA (PA-8600 at 552 MHz) which scores only 400. The only chip faster than P4 at FP is the 833 MHz Alpha which scores a barely better 571 (and the P4 still beats the fastest Alpha at SPECfp2000 - and is 1/4 the price to boot!).