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Transmeta's Demise Predicted
egdull writes: "According to this story, Transmeta's party is over. Between buggy first-implementations of chips, leadership shake-ups, and "being outfoxed by Intel," Transmeta is done, according to C|Net. With a low stock price, they might be a target for a takeover, with Via being the only named interested party."
thats not really a bad thing, considering how their products never really were that useful to begin with. their research (if any) in regards to lower power consumption could to sold to other companies to keep their systems cooler (*ahem* amd *ahem*). but, performance-wise, they were nothing special. *shrugs* sorry guys. so many other sources of power drain (harddrive, lcd screen, gfx cards) that the cpu isnt the only battery drain in even semi recent laptops anymore.
To state the obvious. I was really looking forward to a tiny, low power computing revolution.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
What?! No mention of Linus?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Since I'm not intimately familiar with Transmeta's designs and strategy, does anyone know why they chose to compete on the x86 market, instead of aiming for IA-64 compatibility and early releasing of consumer IA-64 systems?
Bush Lies Watch
I wish they had been able to buy aplha's tech. It seems like they could have used it.
hehehe if Linus goes to work for VIA, maybe VIA support will finally be stabler than Intel chipsets.
smile,
-l
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I wonder what Linus is thinking of doing if his employer goes.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Any company as confident as Transmeta that their product is going to revolutionize the market is in for a rude awakening. They didn't invent anything substantially new or different, and constantly touted how impressive their work was. In the end, it was a lot of spin to hide underpowered processors. Power is cheap, in the end, and people want top-end speed and performance.
Now, as a stock holder... should I sell or should I hold out and hope for that Via buy out???
This is the story of my portfolio. I still haven't managed to recover from my Lucent losses!!!
Please keep in mind while reading the article that Intel was (and may still be) an investor in CNet. They may be hoping for a self-fulfillng prophecy with respect to Transmeta. Hopefully this is not the case and the article is fairly reported (I don't know enough about Transmeta to make that determination myself) - just be congnisant of the source.
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Did anybody notice those goofy quote graphics? What genius came up with them?
"INTEL OUTFOXED THEM"
"IT IS A SLICE OF A SLICE OF A SLICE OF PIE"
Whoever it is, I'd like to SMACK HIM.
m00.
VIA could potentially become a big player in the CPU market. This technology would prove a useful implementation into their next-gen "Cyrix" stuff. I really like the idea of Transmeta's hardware, but it hasn't really proven useful for the average Joe.
I mean, everyone likes linus and all, but who wasn't expecting this... really?
Drives and Displays are.
So basically they came to market with a nice sounding product, but it was still a product that sells stock, not laptops. It was a product that used important keywords, claimed it could beat intel, and enlisted the god of Linux.
In the end its a product which really doesn't bolster laptop life all that much, and its real use was to make Intel provide the product that they could but did not have to.
You cannot taunt Intel or Microsoft, they have too many people with very large egos, and they will stomp you if you try. The best bet is to operate under their radar... and not to draw attention to yourself with brash claims versus these two behemoths until you can sustain your business.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Granted I am not an MBA nor a chip engineer, so this may be just wishful thinking, but I always wondered why Transmetta didn't play to the strength of their chip: i.e. you could make it act like other chips thru firm/software. I realize that x86 was where the market was, but I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't expect Intel to counter them in the marketplace (as they did).
I always thought that they should market it as an embedded chip, the lynch pin being they could supply you chips that wouldn't require you to relearn a new instruction set. I.e. if you're used to programming a Mips, they'd ship you the chip with the Mips instruction set. If you programmed PPC, then they'd ship you that. That would also give companies exposure to the underlying archetecture of the chip and maybe they'd migrate to its native instruction set.
Like I said, I'm but a mere code jockey, so what do I know.
Transmeta simply failed to deliver sufficient innovation to be competitive. The code morphing was an interesting idea, but they didn't do anything groundbreaking with it. Similarly, Intel managed to narrow the power consumption gap, while still beating them on the benchmarks.
They designed a chip for a market that doesn't exist - on the embedded side, processors like the StrongARM, SH3, and even, at the very low end, stuff like Z80's are smaller, cheaper, and lower power. At the same time, on the high end, ie. laptops, speed is king. With 15" LCD's on laptops these days sucking down the batteries, the power savings of the Transmeta chips weren't worth the lower performance, and certainly weren't going to help boost sales to mhz-obsessed consumers.
It may at first seem odd that a chipset company would buy a processor company. But if you keep in mind that Transmeta is more than just a processor company, it does make sense. On thing that Transmeta has been doing besides producing extremely low-power chips is integrating motherboard chipset functionallity into their processors. Transmeta has a lot of experience with the same issues that Via deals with. In fact, if Transmeta stays independent and gets enough funding, I wouldn't be surprised if they went into the chipset market themselves.
I've nothing against them targeting the "mobile market", but they should have realized: Hey any other machine that's on 24x7 also needs a low-power CPU.
But when I go to pricewatch, I just see Pentiums and Athlons. No Transmetas. So I guess the next server box will be a 99% idle Athlon and a bunch of fans.
As unpopular as this may sound, you can 'play the blame game' as much as you want; but shoddy products, lack-lustre quality control, and broken promises most likely played a larger factor in this 'possibly' unsuccessful venture moreso than any commercial interference.
Of course, I take this article with a huge grain of salt. Products do get pushed back, yes, their stock is down 96% (Sounds familiar), sure, they've changed CEO's a couple times...it's called 'business'. AMD was once counted out too, remember
"Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested." (LT 2004)
Intel is an investor in CNET...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Transmeta intended to create a superior product that would quickly capture a small, but profitable, segment of the market--much in the way Apple Computer has survived with less than 5 percent of the operating system market.
Comparing Transmeta to Apple is stupid.
Transmeta develops and manufactures a single product - the Crusoe. Transmeta relies on this single product to drive their revenue. Apple, on the other hand, makes desktops, laptops, monitors, networking peripherals, and MacOS. They're not relying on a single product to stay afloat. So yes, Apple is still alive while only holding 5% of the OS market. Why? Because 100% of Apple's operating system installations run on Apple's own hardware. (Not counting the five or six Apple clones out there.)
If Apple made their living by only selling MacOS, then the comparison could apply. Not here.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Someone should have told them that when they were aiming for the (non-existant) "sub-notebook" market, their foot was directly in the line of their shot. It doesn't matter how sexy your technology is: if you don't give people what they want or do a job better than the other guy, you'll be out on your ass. CPUs don't whore enough power (compared to, say... a display?) that a low-power CPU makes that much of a difference. That and the fact that no one really wanted a "sub-notebook" as notebooks approached their form factor and the smaller Palm Pilots/Pocket PCs are just, well... sexier and more useful because of their increased portability.
Cool-running CPUs might have made sense for renderfarms and server rooms, but IT departments have already invested in cooling systems, and will the savings for building new hypothetically cooling-free server rooms offset the extra servers you have to purchase because of the Transmeta's sluggish performance?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Ars has a good editorial in response to the CNET article.
At the end of my Crusoe article, I predicted that TM would eventually announce a workstation-class chip. It's been a little over a year and this still hasn't happened, but I remain convinced that they're working on just such a project.
I always wondered why nobody ever put 1000 transmeta processors in a shoebox and called it a really compact, cheap to run, rackmount system. They might not be really quick, but the power/instruction is much lower thus, cooling problems and space problems associated with large racks would all but go away.
IIRC, they also have a really small die size and so could be mass produced cheaply. IBM?
The low power consumption was nice for laptops, but they missed the real target. The code morphing would have made this a great chip for small enterprises with limited resources that need a sandbox that can emulate different platforms, or home users that want to run both PC and Mac. There was the potential to make a real dual-booting machine. But they just sold it to laptop makers.
Real shame.
It's hard for any company to compete with Intel sure AMD's done well but how many companies will really make any headway aginst Intel? Not many IMO. It's almost like trying to compete with Windows, Something may be a better product but when people get used to something they don't like to change. It scares them. Maybe not the best thing to compare this to but you get the idea.
Snoozer.
Saw this on zdnet...
The cat is out of the bag. Linus Torvalds was recently seen living under a freeway overpass. When asked about his current living conditions, he remarked "well, Transmeta had to lay me off, and they kept it quiet because they didn't want to enrage their only customers -- Linux geeks." What will this mean for the God of Linux? All the Linux companies are showing cash shortfalls, and none appear to be hiring. A spokesman for Red Hat commented, "We're just tapped out of money. We wish Linus well, but what can we say? We got what we wanted out of him, and know he's going to have to get a real job like the rest of us will have to sooner than later."
Linus appears to be taking it in stride. "Well, I've always said that I wasn't interested in making money off Linux. And heck, this overpass is not so bad. It's still better than Finland."
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda of Slashdot, often thought of a spiritual leader of Linux, commented that "Hey, he's welcome to crash at my house, except that my house is due to be repo'ed any day know due to the VA Linux stock price crash."
Transmeta never had a competitive advantage in the marketplace. They could never claim that their CPU's were better enough in any respect to make them a suitable replacement for a comperable Intel CPU.
Their key angles of low heat/longer battery life were true, but the extent with which they were true wasn't enough to get anybody's attention.
For example: If Transmeta's CPU would have made my laptop last 8 hours on a charge vs 4, then THAT is worth making a switch, even if it means lost CPU power. I don't think they ever produced that kind of difference.
In order to compete with Intel, Transmeta had to have a REAL competitive advantage. They never had one good enough to make them a viable option. So, I'd have to agree that they may not belong for this world...
Take care,
Brian
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Hannibal from Ars Technica has a good commentary on the whole transmeta state of affairs here. Enjoy.
$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;
They can now give the world a free (as in B&S) low power chip design ?
I predicted their demise when they first release this crap. They didn't open their code morphing technology, that by itself would have given them a market. How can they expect geeks to buy their shit unless they give geeks something fun to play with. A slow chip that you can't customize to suit your needs and costs more than the competition doesn't exactly excite me. I'm sorry. But at least we can blame it on management. They had an oportunity the likes of which they will NEVER see again. That was, they had the whole linux community watching them for a few weeks. They could have said anything. They could have done anything. What'd they do? Make another windows laptop.
This happened to DEC. Apollo. Symbolics. MIPS. Thinking Machines. (Just a sample, the full list is lots longer.) If you're a very smart fellow with focus on CS theory instead of market practice, it can happen to you too.
It's a Linux-inspired company, there is no strategy, just a burning hatred for Windows.
"These are quirky, quirky people."
;)
That is clearly a reference to Linus.
-pos
The truth is more important than the facts.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
The greatest intellectual property Transmeta had was/is Linus. Transmeta wouldn't have had nearly the press that it has had, without Linus. Because most of what Transmeta did was bank on Linus' name for Marketing hype and brand identification, it was doomed from the start.
.bomb who banked upon hype and marketing way too much.
When I first saw reports of Transmeta, they were "hush hush" about what they were developing, but not so about WHO they were hiring. After their first product announcement, I asked myself this rhetorical question, "so what?" I never answered that question.
Transmeta will be just another
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Take note of my username: Fudboy. I made this account in the midst of the heyday hype just prior to the first Transmeta product announcement, largely to combat said hype and interject a note of reason into the discussions here at slashdot. Many of the denizens here were overly excited about Transmeta, what with Linus on board and the appearance of their being David to Intel's Goliath...
It is a sad day coming for the chip industry, but not unexpected. Transmeta had some very sharp ideas, great talent, excellent marketting and the promise of revolutionary influence on the mobile computing market. But sadly, many forces conspired to undermine the great promise TMTA represented: most apparently the problems in logic design, lack of op/s power, expensive wholesale prices resulting from increasingly bizarre fabrication contractual arrangements with competitors, a weakening market made worse by tragedy... but I digress.
In a few years, there'll be another company attempting a Transmeta-style hype campaign, and I hope that when that day comes, we can all remember how this played out.
While it is sad to see a company die, let us not forget that this isn't entirely a tragedy- the venture capitalists won great riches, the principles of the company also surely won such riches if they were smart enough to sell liberally afetr the IPO, a handfull of speculators surely won such riches in the early heyday of trading the TMTA stock... But also let us mourn those who will find themselves unemployed, those whose brilliant work will be shelved or scraped and forgotten, those foolish enough to still hold the stock and scramble to cut their losses even at this late hour. Let us offer them our condolences.
:)Fudboy
I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
Their products were expensive, underpowered, buggy and late to market. They thought that employing Linus would give them some geek cred, and for a while it did, but they did not offer a compelling product.
It reads: "This Web page is not gone yet!". :-)
If I were Nvidia, I'd try to buy-out Transmeta... I mean Tramsmeta has a dream team of chip designers. Nvidia seems to be in a very good position these days... as their company makes chips way more complex than an Intel P4. Since they recently entered into the AMD chip-set arena with the upcoming Nforce chipset... if stands to reason that Nvidia would be calculating its current holdings to leverage a buyout. This is purly theory on my part here, so don't go tell your mom'n'pop just yet. But lets continue to look at the situation... Nvidia took a chance on buying out 3Dfx when it had sealled the deal to make the game-consol. So now that its only competion is the Radion card, who knows...
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Sell today.
Book a tax loss.
Wait 30 days to avoid the wash-sale rule.
More tax loss sellers hit the market.
Buy your shares back lower.
Company goes bankrupt.
Have the worthless certificate issued.
Frame it.
Hang it over your desk.
Don't make the same mistake again.
in addition to their virtualized x86 processor is one that supports many different architectures (Alpha, x86, PA-RISC, etc) on a single chip, with context switching between them. Add vmware to the mix, and you've got virtual OSs on top of virtual, native processors. Talk about being able to run platform 'A's native code on platform 'B'!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
why does transmeta have to enter every market? they could easily license the technology to amd and remain a small profitable company. is the future really about wintel everywhere? look at arm who has a rather nice set of tech. large and unprofitable is really no fun!
Microsoft was a genius at marketing themselves. All I have heard from transmeta..is bugs
Sorry, but am I the only one to notice Transmeta (VA in Red) Vs. VA "Software" (Transmeta in Red)??
Looks like similar fates, I'm afraid...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I think the biggest killer for transmeta was that the computers that they were in were almost always so expensive. They were touting them as sub-$1000 dollar notebook chips, but most of the ones I saw were $3000...
Transmeta is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered faggot community when last month IDC confirmed that The Crusoe Chip accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that the Crusoe Chip has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Transmeta is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [transmeta.com] in the recent benchmark comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict the Crusoe Chip's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the Crusoe Chip faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Crusoe Chip because Transmeta is dying. Things are looking very bad for Transmeta. As many of us are already aware, The Crusoe Chip continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Transmeta is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Transmeta leader Linus states that there are 7000 users of Crusoe. How many users of Crusoe are there? Let's see. The number of intel versus crusoe posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 crusoe users. Crusoe posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of AMD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of crusoe. A recent article put crusoe at about 80 percent of the The Crusoe Chip market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Crusoe users. This is consistent with the number of crusoe Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of everyone, abysmal sales and so on, Transmeta went out of business and was taken over by microsoft who sell a troubled OS. Now Transmeta is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that The Crusoe Chip has steadily declined in market share. The Crusoe Chip is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If The Crusoe Chip is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. The Crusoe Chip continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, The Crusoe Chip is dead.
Transmeta is dying
This of course is provided that VIA can avoid making the same screwups they did with the KT athlon chipsets, which don't seem to like nvidia cards. Or maybe that's nvidia's fault? No one has ever given me a straight answer on what's going on there.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
First of all, WRT HDDs and Laptop screens being the power suckers, the processors do such a large percentage of power. If you cut the power in half, the laptop might not last twice as long, but it will surely last quite a bit longer. In smaller notebooks (transmeta's market), the displays are smaller also, making the processor a larger percentage of the power consumption.
As for the sub-notebook market not existing, it very much exists, just mainly in japan. People in the US whine and moan that we are behind in technology, but when it comes our way, we whine it costs too much...
WRT performance: Transmeta has a good point when they say "computers are fast enough". It may sound silly, but with a 600MHz pIII, what can't you do? You can write emails, right? You can run windows 2000, Mozilla, IE, Linux, MS Office, StarOffice, GCC, Kylix, Java... you can web browse, etc. What precisely do you need more power for?
For games? Not everyone needs or even wants to play doom 6 and quake 5 or whatnot on their laptop. For many people, having a smaller laptop that runs for longer on less power at a reasonable speed is better than having a portable desktop that lasts all of 30 minutes.
WRT Using the code-morphing aspects to their advantage. This is a very cool feature from a technical perspective, but not one that will earn them any money in the short run. What they are aiming to make is a drop-in replacement for most laptops, expecially sub-notebooks. That means x86.
-- the doktor.
Do any specific quirky smart guys not motivated by money come to mind?
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
It would be a real shame to lose the most important piece of Transmeta's technology - the code morphing. Lower power was just a side benefit.
Image being able to design a totally new architecture unique to your specific application. Utilizing Transmeta's technology, you could design a specialized interface to the hardware, unique to your application, and then build a software platform around it.
Sure, that doesn't seem useful to someone running Windows applications, but think about how easy it would be to create specialized embedded devices. If you needed a processor with only 30 instructions, instead of the 4 billion provided by present-day CISC technology, you could create a pseudo-RISC layer on top of the chip and write software optimized for those procedures.
I'll be very disappointed if, in 30 years I find myself thinking how it should've revolutionized the industry, but was instead forgotten about.
Well, if I had to give a FuckedCompany.Com type of post-mortem, it'd probably go something like this:
Hey, guys! Let's sell a CPU that requires a custom chipset, provides a quarter of the processing power, quarter of the power requirements, and at the same price as the top-of-the-line chips!
Of course, they could just sell an Intel CPU and underclock it. I feel bad for Transmeta. Their code morphing and what not was cool.
The really sad part is that they stressed the "low power" part of their design. The really cool part was the code morphing. The crusoe was a full 128bit (256? can't remember, although they had it planned) processor that had an emulation layer rinning on it to translate x86 commands into it's own instruction set. This is really cool. Transmetta could change the whole chip design drastically and still maintain compatability with this layer. also you could speed up your computer with a simple bios update when they had finished more research for algorythms and tweaked the code some more.
I was wondering if any other company had interests in code morphing technology of this type.
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
Transmeta still has time to open their code morphing technology and let the open source community hack everything that will be needed to allow their chip to run OSX, HPUX, IRIX and Solaris natively. If Transmeta wanted to beat any other chip maker at their own game they had a limitted chance, similar to how java had a chance at beating any other web browser. It is an abstracted idea capable of running on anything. Transmeta CPUs are an abstracted instruction set capable of running any other software if the proper bridges are built into the code morhping software. Unfortunately transmeta holds the key to their toolshed that houses the materials required to build those bridges. They have a few thousand people willing to help them for free but won't give up that key.
:)
Ah well, I don't care. I just hope they take their freakin IP with 'em.
First Transmeta is dying post !!
The most revealing part of this article was the comment that Transmeta and TSMC were pointing fingers at each other over reliability problems. This is *very* bad for Transmeta -- reminiscent of the whole Ford/Firestone squabble over tires.
Transmeta is a "fabless" semiconductor company; their advantage is supposed to be in their architecture and circuit implementation, not in the process and manufacturing technology. Who makes their chips should be invisible to the public and their customers, and should be determined entirely by internal questions of who can deliver what they need at the lowest price.
If their technology depends on the fab doing tricky, custom stuff for them, they will be at the mercy of the Intels, AMDs, and IBMs that have their own manufacturing facilities under their own control.
The power saving technologies that Transmeta developed would have been great sellers 5 years from now, when laptops switch to organic LED's or even just white LED backlights and hard drives begin to be replaced with solid state devices. Then the CPU really would be the bottleneck in making a low power system. I still like the idea of diskless Linux workstations with Transmeta chips, though. Too bad they didn't capitalize on innovating solutions.
Embedded systems engineers are running into trouble for certain applications. On the one hand, StrongARM, MIPS, and even low-end microcontrollers like the 8051 are reliable and cool. But in the race for speed everyone has thrown power consumption to the wind. What if you need something more powerful than a StrongARM, but can't make use of Ultra SPARC and Intel processors because they simply run much too hot for embedded devices? So the embedded engineers are starting to resort to custom-designed processors tuned for specific purposes. But it would be much better if someone put effort into higher performance CPUs that didn't munch up 50 watts of power.
I now must go get some paper towels to dry off my monitor after I spit up some bottled water on it after reading your comment :-)
This doesn't sound like a credible source for technical information:
"We'd get products and then find an anomaly. You can put in a workaround but the only way to fix it is through silicon," said Steve Andler, Toshiba's vice president of marketing.
I think VIA could contend with Intel and AMD if they bought the Crusoe and Transmeta and merged them with the old Cyrix processors that they already produce. A third major processor manufacturer is exactly what we need. Increase the competition between Intel and AMD that is already doing wonders for the advancement of processors in general.
Transmeta has about $262 million in cash, but it expects to burn through $20 million in the current quarter.
at that rate, if their business doesn't pick up, they'll be out of business in 6 years!
tThese seem like really sweet machines. 14.5 hours of total battery life...
Do a google search before posting.
than the actual story, is the related stories below it.
* Transmeta CEO to step down March 1, 2001
* Transmeta plans to raise more than $140 million in IPO October 2, 2000
* Transmeta shoots for 700 MHz with new chip January 20, 2000
* Intel clones face tough market September 2, 1998
* Transmeta dumps latest CEO October 16, 2001
* Next Crusoe chip bogged down in testing October 9, 2001
* Transmeta goes after non-PC chip market October 2, 2001
Not exactlly a portfolio of success stories.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Unless you are a day trader, this shouldn't pose a problem. There is an element of risk involved, especially when investing in the short run. Looking in the long run, however, one can stand to make a great return on their investment. Transmeta isn't done; they have newer processors planned. Manufacturers have thus far only focused on the low-power properties of the Crusoe, and not very much has happened with the code morphing, which is evident from the C|Net article. Code morphing is a potential technology; when companies realize the value of it, then you will see manufacturers flocking over it rather than dropping it like a bad dream.
Considering that most of Transmeta's research over the past few years have been on concepts such as code morphing, and considering that Intel and AMD haven't been researching this venue, Transmeta would therefore have the lead in such a category for quite a while. The only question is: when will companies realize the value of this technology?
Note: I am not an analyst nor an investor (no money here). Feel free to take my argument with a grain of salt.
ROTFL
hahahaahahahahaahahhaaaaaa
IIRC Transmeta was the first one to optimize power consumption by design. Probably the world is just not ready for low power chips, but it will be later.
Compare it with engines: about 100 years ago, Rudolf Diesel introduced a more efficient combustion method, which even needed a different kind of fuel. Up to 10 or 15 years ago, diesel engines were noisy, stinky and less powerful than gas engines, so not many people cared about their fuel consumption being slightly lower.
During the 1990s, more and more people (at least in Europe) became aware of the importance of reducing energy consumption. Volkswagen/Audi were the first to introduce a really low-consumption yet very powerful type of diesel engine (TDI). After some years, most other manufactorers saw the growing market and followed. Rudolf Diesel didn't profit at all from his work - he even killed himself in desperation of his seemingly failed invention. But his technology is still there, and today it rocks.
We may probably lose Transmeta, but the idea of designing CPUs in a way that they consume less power while still being quite powerful will remain. The market for this technology is still new, but it is expected to grow - through higher energy prices as well as the need for longer uptime of battery-powered devices.
On behalf of people with a clue everywhere, I'd just like to remind you:
We told you so. :)
It should be in Microsoft's best interest to sponsor Transmeta and dig them out of the hole considering all of the effort they are putting into developing web pads and tablet pcs. Even though Microsoft isn't manufacturing them, their superior battery life is one of the biggest advantages tablet pcs would have.
"I hate people, but i love Gatherings. Isn't it ironic?" -- Randall Graves, Clerks
I didn't know there were still Apple clones. Are they relegated to System 7.5, or are they allowed to sell OS X
There aren't any more.... Herr Jobs cut all their licenses when he returned to the company. Personally, I think that OS X's requirements may well be an attempt to end that experiment once and for all. After all, people have gotten OS X running on 604 based machines, which were the last processor that the cloners put out. But if it is hardcoded to _require_ a G3, then its a guaranteed sale for Apple.
--saint
Anyone who associates with Linus gets it up the shitter.
What stunning ignorance you have. Thier primary business was hardware.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Transmeta processors are HARDWARE? Wow....
Wouldn't it be better to wait for it to actually play out before we start playing "Taps"?
Sure, they've got some big challenges and I won't be rushing to buy their stock anytime soon, but burying them at this point is just as much FUD as the pre-launch hype.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
you know, I was excited about transmeta. Not because of their most famous employee (I use BSD, VMS, NT, and BeOS and don't deal with toy OSs), but because of what they offered, or least had the potential to offer.
I read their press releases, but was even moreexcited by their white papers. But their chips couldn't live up to their own expectation. Time passed, I sort of lost track of them. Then a couple months back, I needed to buy a laptop, so I looked for something with a Crusoe in it. I found a handful, but they were underpowered and overpriced, and needless to say, I got a PIII.
Ok, we all know the x86 instruction set deserves to die. Is it better for Transmeta to emulate it (slowly) in software/hardware than it is for virtual pc to emulate it in software or intel & amd to emulate it in (fast and hot) hardware?
I had thoughts about building a crusoe coprocessor card for some custom hardware I was dreaming up. I guess I'll have to go back to daydreaming about an ARM coprocessor. A shame that good technology floundered? Maybe, but I'm a capitalist, and a darwinist, so I can't cry for them.
Please don't write us off just yet. We have over two years worth of cash in the bank, and we've recently announced our second product. The Crusoe chip has been very popular in Japan, including holding the #1 Notebook Top Seller spot for a while.
Is it easy to go up against Intel? Of course not. This is not an overnight, just-add-water kind of deal. We're trying to change the way people perceive computing. NEC has taken our chip and combined it with a low-power screen for further power savings. RLX is using the Crusoe chip to build ultra-dense server racks. Granted, there's some overcapacity in this area at the moment, but that could turn around.
Yes, our stock price has been beaten down. Yes, Intel is a formidable competitor. Yes, we've had a management shake-up. I don't think it's nearly as bad as the CNET article makes it sound. I'm not looking for a new job, and I'm staying fully vested with the ESPP. Let's wait and see what happens. You may be pleasantly surprised.
ceesco blurted out:
I can't think of a single OS for any 64-bit architecture either [sun.com]
PONA-Boy chimes in:
How about this OTHER one? I have to say that, for a commercial UNIX, TRU64 is _very_ friendly and it runs (*GASP*) natively on the non-iNTEL chip of choice: ALPHA!!! Linux fans everywhere CHEER!!!
-PONA-
When I mow my lawn, I pray for silence
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
Considering most servers are plugged into the wall, I imagine most people are more concerned with the *speed* of their server rather than their electricity bills.
Yeah, I can the ISPs right now: Hey guys, we take a 40% speed hit but we'll save $15 on next month's electricity bill! Let buy it!
Due to TM's lack of speed compared with amd/intel, they never had a chance in the server market.
This company was a real loser from the get go. The only power people care about is computing power.
1. Intel is trying to dominate the market, and now that they have slashed prices to fight AMD, this means they are willing to lose money to beat TMTA. Remind you of anything? Like, say, monopolistic anti-competitive behaviours? There's a reason it's called ...
2. If TMTA sticks to its guns and survives in the Pacific and Japanese markets, they have a good chance of survival. If they try to expand to quickly, they will die.
3. The killer app for TMTA is the webpad and laptop. If you get a diskless version that lasts 8-12 hours with a TMTA chip or 4-6 hours for Intel - which one do you think will do well?
Of course, I'm biased, I bought TMTA stock after the market crash, cheap. Only a few hundred bucks and it's worth the risk.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Can YOU spot the message from Linus in this discussion? HINT! It has a strange and somewhat catchy line at the end which his personal friends can use to identify him with.
[AC'd for those who wouldn't get it, and not to reveal who *I* am!]
Their hardware is optimized to make the x86 the one that is emulated. They have special registers that makes the optimizations work best their. Comparing two pointers to know if they can be the same or not while dynamically recompiling, etc.
It's been written:
Alfred E. Programmer: Surprised by Poverty
(that's a Google cache; the original server is refusing me)
I remember reading that many times on cnet.com until a while ago. I haven't seen a public statement by cnet.com regarding this fact, have you?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The fact that "Surprised by Wealth" came back to smack him in the nuts is just icing on the cake for the rest of us who have watched ESR shoot his mouth off exactly when no one is asking for his opinion.
I guess this guy can add Transmeta to the list of "* is dying" stories.
Or does common sense now rate "troll"? Are Transmeta's shareholders suing the company because their chips _don't_ run slow? A little clarification, please.
... then maybe I'll finally be able to put a decently fast (~300 mhz) CPU into an ATX case that doesn't need a CPU fan that keeps dying. Oh how I wish there was more low-maintinance hardware out there...
shut your stupid monkey mouth..why ppl have to say the stupidest things on here is beyond me
Examples:
Digital makes an Alpha chip that's 25% faster than Intel's chip. That's a noticeable speed boost! ... But, if you wait a year, Intel's chips will match its speed. So you might as well buy an Intel chip now and plan to upgrade in a few years.
Centaur makes a chip that's 25% cheaper than Intel's chip. That's a nice price drop! ... But, Intel makes so many chips that don't turn out to be 1.5 GHz P4s, it can afford to send out all those low-speed Celerons at roughly the same price as Centaur. So, you might as well buy a low-cost brand-name Intel chip.
Now, Transmeta makes a chip that's 25% cooler... and once again you can buy an Intel chip that's almost as good, but much more available.
In each of these cases, Intel has been able to shift the price-performance ratio and knock out a competitor. Only AMD's Athlon line, which is capable of competing with Intel from top to bottom, seems to be able to stake out its own territory.
I think the niche market for general purpose CPUs doesn't exist.
Fucking gun kooks can eat my anus hole raw.
"So, what chips to you emulate?"
"x86!"
"and uh, what else?"
"x86! Say, did we mention Linus works here?"
"yeah sure okay... so tell me how do I become a developer?"
(Not making this next one up: http://www.transmeta.com/developers/index.html)
"Transmeta will provide a Crusoe processor design package to qualified OEM customers. The design package will include Crusoe processor specifications and data books, system design guidelines, reference design schematics, and BIOS programmer guides. At this time, the Crusoe processor design package is available only for Transmeta's early product design partners."
So much for "open source". Hope none of you were relying too heavily on Midori.
(I tried to copy & paste the text to conserve SA's bandwidth but the Lameness filter says it has too many 'junk' characters. Too bad it doesn't actually say which characters are considered junk.)
Don't forget the Class Action suit that claims "defendants made false and misleading statements about Transmeta's business and its principal product." That would definitely explain its current market trouble.
Find out more about the Class Action suit against the company here.
Transmeta is not one of them of course, not only is it not successfull it isnt truly low power either.
... I doubt there ever will be.
.NET even that oppurtunity could dwindle though ...
There is not much of a market for medium power architectures which can emulate high power architectures
Efficient emulation of architectures for compatibility reasons however will always be interesting as long as we live in a world where most applications remain machine language binaries. With
From a potential upcoming job interview:
"So, what are some of the projects you've worked on previously?"
"Well, let's see... I.. accomplishment, accomplishment, WROTE A UNIX-TYPE OPERATING SYSTEM, accomplishment, accomplishment..."
"Hmmm... you don't seem to have any ASP experience... are you sure you can contribute to this project?"
It really is no wonder the entire computer industry is in the tank. The whole "IT new economy revolutionary blah" really was just all about upgrading to the next Intel this and Microsoft that. Eighty thousand billion dollars worth of shrinkwrap, heatsinks and icons.
sigh...
My friends who have visited their ridiculously opulent office space suggest that it was never about the tech. They described them as a 'built to flip' type of company from the beginning.
Alpha-based technology may yet buy them out. I'm pegging Samsung as the logical candidate to acquire them. An alpha in my laptop? Oh, yes, please! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm not that familiar with Crusoe's design and the morphing technology, but I always wondered if Transmeta could make a cheap Java processor of it?
Daaamn. And I was still hoping that maybe someone would finally build up a nice notebook, regular size, regular battery, Crusoe, that wouldn't burn my legs while working, and run for more than 3 hours. Well, I guess not... looks like it'll be an iBook for me then.
The real question is, who's going to keep Linus in Guinness now?
I assume that as the TM processors can emulate a similar clock speed processor of another architecture, they must be pretty fast to both translate and execute and get nearly equal clock speed, they could run native code at a speed exceeding that of x86 processors. As I understood it, they were comming out with two processors (originally, I think more have been announced since), one with a more basic config and a second with higher clock speed, and extra cache to enhance x86 emulation performance. The slower smaller and one would assume cheaper processor was supposed to run Mobile Linux (IIRC), most of the news has covered x86/windows devices, but I've heard very little about native code on the TM processors. Intel has beat TM at laptop market by "borrowing" TM's technology (speedstep and low voltage). The Linux stuff was aimed at webpads and thin servers, both markets seemed to slow even more than the desktop market. I kinda see as it as time for a revolution, Intel and M$ have dominated for quite a while and it seems like its time for a new paradigm, don't know what that might be (or else I could retire early, it sucks to still be working at 37). Technology needs to cycle every few years, and it ceratinly seems like time for something new. Processor emulation seemed like a looser to me from the start, maybe with someone other than Intel with thier overly deep pockets it will be really, really hard to compete (read impossible), running head on into a giant, never seemed like a good business plan. Thier code morphing tech is certainly impressive, but why emulate/copy when you can end run, with Intel moving to IA-64 if everone needs to change processors anyway, now seems the right time to introduce a competing technology. I actually see AMD as being the major x86 leader as people avoid IA-64. IA-64 seems like a pretty big risk and alot of x86 apps probably won't work or will require emulation anyway so another processor (with M$'s support of course) could emerge. TM should bag emulation and try to innovate mobile processors or extend the x86, I don't see much else working well.
Transmeta: Code morphing, low power
ARM: low power, very low power, high performance
Transmeta "We can beat Intel"
ARM: "Intel pay us money to use our stuff"
Wonder why ARM are still around and Transmeta are going down ? Not too hard to figure is it.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
This was not a troll.
His information was wrong but his post was not a troll (Intel was an investor in CNET until recently). The right response is to reply with a correction not to moderate it down.
I have meta-moderated you as "unfair."
"I told you so." Zico must be having flashbacks to the conversations he had with his 6th grade girlfriend. Sad...
How many of them bailed out?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
How many of them bailed out?
.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing