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."

Comments

not too bad

[dakoda]

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.

Re:CPUs aren't the power hogs in laptops.

[Lars T.]

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.

They failed to sell it's most unique feature.

[Picass0]

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.

Re:Just Goes to Show

[bstadil]

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.

symbolics of the 90's

[trb]

Hardware companies have had this problem for more than 30 years: CPUs are a commodity. You gather together a bunch of hot computer scientists (I mean scientists) with great theory and design skills but not lots of market vision. They want to implement the latest cool thing, and they forget that what makes a CPU better is mostly a matter of squishing the little wires closer together. Computer science hasn't progressed much in the past 40 years, it's chip fab materials science that's made the leap.

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.

Re:Just Goes to Show

[sheldon]

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.

Code morphing was the real technology

[uslinux.net]

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.