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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.
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.
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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All of the above is my opinion; I am an investor, not an advisor.
For a graph of Transmeta's recent stock action, click here.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
It's not only the power, it's also the heat. The heat that is generated in a tiny area in a device that doesn't like to be hot. Even the low-power Intel "Mobile" processors can get pretty hot compared to notebook harddrives.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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.
This is not specific to Intel but a general phenomenon in the business world. One of the major strength of big companies is that they do not need anything near perfect hit rate to be very successful. You can read a bit more about this in Clayton Christensen's excellent book The Innovators Dilemma. What they do need though is the ability to recognize the need for adjustments to the new reality as presented when something innovative comes along. Intel has been excellent doing the latter.
Help fight continental drift.
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.
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.
Then you look at other companies like Polaroid for an example of what happens when a big company doesn't realize it needs to change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.