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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."
I wonder what Linus is thinking of doing if his employer goes.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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.
Never the less, the transmeta processors are a good way to achieve binary compatibility using more advanced architectural concepts (VLIW). There lack of performance is a by product of the design decisions, if you want a low power synchronous design you have to reduce the speed [1]. The only suprise is that they achieved the performance they did vs. the difference in power consumption. Remember they are not just executing the bloated and inefficient [2] x86 instruction set but also effectively recompiling it as well. Personally I do not believe their ideas will dissappear just yet, though if the world economy goes into full recession Transmeta may not survive.
:-)
[1] I suppose you could increase the parallelism, but there is only so much you can get from the instruction scheme.
[2] If you do not believe it is inefficient then explain insructions such as XLAT (D7) and CMC (F5). (Yes i am sad enough to be able to assemble x86 code from memory
Physicists are said to stand on one another's shoulders while programmers stand on one another's toes.
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.
No, Intel no longer owns any part of CNET. If they did, CNET would have included the statement indicating ownership.
I know this because a year ago or so, I noticed an Intel story that did not mention their relationship, and I contacted the author of the article. He responded that Intel had recently sold its shares in CNET.
"And like that