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Via One-ups Transmeta
An aonymous reader submitted that"Via just announced the Eden platform, which promises lower power consumption than Transmeta. If it follows the C3 line of CPUs, I'm guessing it will also deliver much better performance at a lower cost (the C3s gave significantly better performance than Transmeta, but at just under 10W, so a bit more power)."
The low power chips are nice and all, but where is the CPU showing off Transmeta's true technology? All that code morphing stuff should enable a laptop to be made with a switch labeled "G4" or "x86".
There are more energy-hogs in a laptop than just the cpu. Display, harddisk and recently the graphics accelerators need a good share of the battery life. Decreasing the power consumption of the cpu alone won't get us very much closer to the one-day-per-charge laptop, although it's certainly a step in the right direction. Other interesting applications of less wasteful processors are clusters and servers, which otherwise need expensive cooling.
Power consumption and heat dissipation are issues to consumers and manufacturers, but clearly not enough to warrant employing a lower performance architecture at this point. Added to which, it appears that competitors were capable of rolling out competing technology far too quickly - Transmeta never hada chance to get support.
At this point it seems that the smartest thing Transmeta can do is start shopping its assets around to possible suitors.
I'm hoping the more clever watchers of the semiconductor industry can enlighten me on this. As far as I can tell, Transmeta has been an expensive and overhyped flop.
They came out with low power consumption CPUs that, while cool, aren't THAT cool, really (to the point where Intel and AMD immediately responded with conventional laptop CPUs that were in the same spec ballpark), and weren't that fast, either. In fact, when you sit down with them, they're quite slow for the $$$. And that was they debuted - let alone now, in Q1 2002. Their design involved doing IA emulation right above the silicon, which sounds wacky to me; fine, advances in runtime optimization lately are quite interesting (hotspot) but it doesn't sprout wings and fly, and I can't see how we could ever expect it to.
Then we have the fact that virtually no one sells transmeta-based products, and some significant percentage of the few companies that said they would, have since backed out of the deal (which screams trouble with the product).
Maybe I'm just too cynical. Yes, everybody loves them because they're competing with Intel and they're a patron of Linux. Please, tell me why I'm wrong about this. I'd love to be convinced their killer app is right around the corner.
If I'm right, though, they should call it a day, shut down now and return whatever money they have left to their investors...
We're on the road to Tycho.