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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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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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http://www.assortedinternet.com/hosting/
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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
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.
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!
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...
Intel is an investor in CNET...
No, they are not. If you have proof otherwise, please point a link to it. CNET told me a year ago that Intel no longer holds CNET stock.
"And like that
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.
There's no such law, only a question of journalistic ethics. News outlets that note such things about ownership and financial interests are trying to "do the right thing".
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!
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.
Basically, it consisted of 3 hot-swapable bricks (each slightly larger than your standard red brick), each containing 2 IDE HDDs and a control card with CPU and communications. They used some crazy thermal interface pads to use the brick chasis as the heatsink, too. I really hope they can get back on their feet, but Transmeta going under would probably mean an end to their product.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Guess that depends upon if you can afford to lose the money. If you have 100 shares, they are worth 175 dollars right now. Not a huge amount of money, and maby, just maby it might turn around. Anyways, look at the amount of money you'd get back from selling your shares, do you really need that money? Do you need a little bit of it to buy some other stocks with? Maby you might want to sell half your shares so that you can buy shares of MSFT. Whatever.
To state the obvious. I was really looking forward to a tiny, low power computing revolution.
Well it happened a long time ago, or have you not seem an ARM chip yet? Maybe you where looking forward to an x86 compatible tiny, low power computing revolution or something.
M0571y H@rml355.
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.
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!
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.
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. :)
Personally I want it to be stable (that is a comment about me not Transmeta:-)! For a lot of tasks CPU speed is an issue, but for many, many, many other tasks it is a complete non-issue. I still see Transmeta having a role in the world, I just don't think they have really started yet, they are waiting for everyone to catch up to the point where Crusoes are what you want! Take routers as a simple example, I would love a Transmeta powered router upon which I can run my choice of i386 OS (and is there not a Linux distro for the native command set of the crusoe?). I know it will be a long, long time before I can afford to buy a bigger pipe than I could saturate with IpSec connections being handled by a "slow" procesor like a Crusoe is at the moment.
Not releasing a commodity system using the Crusoe is costing Transmeta dearly! You would think a company that hired the most famous proponent of the Bazaar software development model would have realised the advantage of placing their hardware in the hands of all who wanted it (the enthusiasts). How many Crusoe suitable projects are going to be developed by closed shops and how many would be started by hackers.
The crusoe seems to be a very good idea because of its potential for embedded markets (and I strongly believe the PC market is going embedded over the next 10 years). Over a 10 year period we might expect to see 64GHz processors, 4GB memory modules and Gb wireless networking and it is in this market that Crusoe will shine as a 2-16GHz processor with an intelligent power management system and hardware-software control (who better to do Bochs/VmWare than transmeta via on chip software which optimises itself to how you actually use the processor). Imagine adding this 16GHz processor and a 1GB memory module to a basic board at the equivalent price you could put together a 66-500MHz Processor with 128Mb ram now. It is getting into the realm where it can handle "anything" on chip, I'm thinking TV/Video as a top power user for anything with a display. We talk of how we have computers in everything and how they will all be "online parts of our digital homes" but is the idea of Free software and its development model not to make it easier to build systems as you will always have less parts to invent so why would these embedded computers run propritary systems when the horsepower will be available in an energy efficient package to allow them to use a general purpose OS and avail of any extra pieces they might like to add (how about in car media players for an easy example, you could use dedicated dsp chips but if you go for a Free software solution you can leave the hooks to ask the question "where do you want to go today"!
The killer aspects I saw of the Transmeta idea were the fact that one CPU could transform from a i386 to an ia64 (whether they did it or not or even if the actual hardware they built could be capable) or some other 32 bit processor and the fact that the CPU could do a lot more in terms of power consumption control than a normal CPU design (thanks to the on chip software). The markets for these features are only starting to develop (the processor morphing ability may never in fact have a market and may simply serve as a method to keep the production price down by keeping the production run as large as possible). Power consumption is going to become a bigger and bigger issue in our lives as time goes by (or we have to really work hard to make sure that whatever country we live in does a good job of hording power and preventing other countries from using any). If we gave a computer to every family on the planet without one tomorrow, how much oil would we need to create the energy? How many nuclear power plants?
Transmeta may well be failing but if they do it will be down to lack of money and poor management that let them set out on the strategy they have persued without the money to back it up. They probably should have kept their mouths shut for another few years to let the problems they could solve develop a bit more, but I've the advantage of hindsight (and I don't think I ever thought about this until now). The idea of Transmeta is right, the time is note quite right and as for the management ... God knows! What does this mean for Linux? Nothing! What does this mean for Linus? He will be beating back the propositions from Linux companies who want him on board and hopefully he will decide to step out of a regular job and take some advantage of what he has done to try and do something he sets out to do instead (be it coach a sports team or getting governments to make sense). Linus has deserved the chance to live off all his supporters however directly or indirectly he wants (how long he would deserve to keep doing it if he did it is another matter). I would hope he would do something like take a $n00,000 job with IBM (only because they are in so many pies, no other reason) to do whatever he wants and perhaps go to the IBM AGM/Annual Dinner/Annual Product Briefing if they ask him (i.e. if they think he'd rubbish what they present they won't ask him that year). I'm sure IBM would do it (just what does n =) and I am sure that if he was given free reign with his time he would be a far better person for this planet (cause I know he would never be a force for evil). I worry however that in trying to do the right thing if he parts with Transmeta he may well end up in another job that denies him the total freedom he so richly deserves! Perhaps all the companies making Linux part of their portfolio should consider pledging him a monthly contribution if he ceases full-time employment ($1k each from ibm, sun, sony, sgi, aoltw, redhat, suse, caldera, mandrake, sharp, nokia, creative, nvidia and adaptec would have him living reasonably without hurting any of the companys or us?).
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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.
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)
... 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...
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.
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...
Oh, great. 9,000 companies create a typhoon of Chapter 11 filings that when spread out page at a time cover enough area to be seen from orbit, and *this* company has to explain their stock price. That's fair.
"Your Honor, the combined losses of capital value in the NASDAQ and NYSE listed companies over the past 18 months exceeds the national debt..."
"you're right. Case dismissed."
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
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."
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