Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the chips-ain't-easy dept.
aftk2 writes "According to news.com, chip maker Transmeta - current home of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, has canned 40% (200 people) of its work force, and has shifted its goals toward obtaining profitability in 2003. No word on whether there were any penguins seen leaving the building."
328 comments
linus wasn't lying...
by
edrugtrader
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· Score: 5, Funny
... when he wore that shirt that said he would replace you with a small shell script!!
Granted their code-morphing and use of VLIW had some interesting concepts, and their power consumption was perfect for laptops, but there just wasn't much of a market for what they developed. Had some of the bigger players (Dell, etc) actively pushed transmeta chips on the market, perhaps they might have made some money.
I for one am not sad this happen... they had some good ideas, but nothing insanely great. br.
Re:Not surprising...
by
Coplan
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree: None of their ideas were "insanely great" as you so well put it. The problem as I see it was too many promises, late releases, and the simple fact that they bragged a bit too much too early.
They should base their business model on some company that is well liked as opposed to a company like Microsoft. Notice similar business tactics? Difference is, Microsoft is big enough to pull it off.
Seriously though, the ideas they had could very well be worthwhile. While I would hate to see Transmeta fold, at least the ideas and the technology are out there, and would likely be sold should the company fail completely. Supposing a company like AMD got ahold of Transmeta's research and knowledge base...a veteran company might be able to market such a product better than Transmeta has.
The way I see it, Transmeta will either pull through, or the technology will get passed on. Sad to say, but it's win/win for the industry...and only hard times ahead for Transmeta.
Re:Not surprising...
by
Com2Kid
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Granted their code-morphing and use of VLIW had some interesting concepts, and their power consumption was perfect for laptops, but there just wasn't much of a market for what they developed.
Nah, there just wasn't much of a market for how they where selling what they had developed.
Now if instead they had, say, concentrated on making development platforms . . . . heh.
Can you imagine sitting down at a machine that is a Sun, PowerPC, and x86 all in one?
That is (was?) the true promise of Transmeta and shoving the chips into laptops was just plain silly. Bleck.
(actualy I just just kind of hoping for an uber emulation machine myself, hehe. Think the next Generation of MAME.:-D )
There isn't a demand for their product. Transmeta is technology searching for a market, instead of the other way around. That's always a bad place to be.
Intel is able to produce products that satisfy the low power x86 market. If consumers *really* demanded lower power chips than those already on the market, Intel could easily exert more resources on creating those products and win on reputation/control of the arch/pricing/deals/you name it. For instances where a product didn't need an x86 chip, One could simply get an appropriately spec'd microcontroller from Motorola and be done with it.
Does sony count as a "big player"? Because they had a few products in their "VIAO" range based upon crusoe chips. (and damm nice they were too)
Re:Not surprising...
by
Bastian
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I know nothing about the feasibility issues involved, but it seems like that kind of idea could be extremely useful. I'm thinking a machine with a CPU capable of running multiple instruction sets simultaneously coupled with a VM-type operating system that allows you to bootstrap virtual machines of various architectures.
Unfortunately, their push was toward the mobile market, so they appear to have put more effort into power consumption than they did performance, and I dont think they even tried to get a Crusoe processor running multiple instruction sets simultaneously yet, so anything along those lines that we would see anytime soon would probably not be better than just buying two different machines of different architectures, and I doubt many companies percieve much of a need to have a machine capable of handling 3, 4, or 5 instruction sets, which is probably where the cost of purchasing such a machine would start to be justified. ..
There's also the possibility of using it as testing machines for software being developed for CPU architectures that haven't had fully functional prototypes come off the line yet, but that's wouldn't provide nearly enough business to keep a company going. . .
There's also the possibility of using it as testing machines for software being developed for CPU architectures that haven't had fully functional prototypes come off the line yet, but that's wouldn't provide nearly enough business to keep a company going. ..
Heh. There are already MAJOR companies that work in exactly this field, but the current tech is, err, well, heh, shall we say costly and rather, uh, gigantic.:-D
Game developers would love it, currently rather funky setups are used all 'round the place for testing games.
Re:Not surprising...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> Transmeta is technology searching for a market > All they'd need is a decent motherboard for a *desktop*! Even if it's slower...so what? For businesses it's be great, more savings through power savings. Might be especially helpful in CA.
True.. with Microsoft running a near-monopoly in the trade, there's little chance for "smaller" companies to get too far. In this world, no matter how "good" you are, you wont get anywhere without a name. For someone with little knowledge of the trade, like myself, it's hard to build up trust for new, or less-known companies. You may own a PC, but most often, it will use Windows as its operating system; just because the name is recommended. If you see the name "Microsoft" somewhere, you know exactly what you're going to get (fancy looking programs that disconnect you from anything you're trying to do on a computer...then make you buy more fancy products to update the way you're disconnected), you see Linux, and you may have heard the name occasionally. You struggle to find more, and you find that, you're being promised numerous supposedly good things. Your trust may build up gradually, but with a company that isn't big enough, the slightest provocation indicating failure may direct your attention away. If the same thing happened to Microsoft, people would only joke about it for a while, or for a lifetime, but it wouldn't affect their sales. There are only a few companies in the software business anyway. Most companies start out in, say, a garage, and work their way somewhere, but rarely even get a chance to advance anywhere.
Having a name that people recognize is all too important. Someone in a company may be a really good consultant. Perhaps even one of the best. But it's really risky to start up your own company, even if you have the knowledge and talent to. Your name means everything, they wont see "James & Jones Consulting" and go there knowing that they are the ones for the job. Most people with a name can make more money than talented people by bluffing! I know a guy in a Higher Level math class, which is meant for math geniuses. He, however merely acts as if he knows what to do...but most surprisingly of all: it works!
I really hope Transmeta pull through.. We may need a less expensive way to fuck-up our computers in the near future.
I think game developers would only love it if the performance could be increased by quite a bit. The clock rate on the fastest Crusoe processor is 800mhz, and although I don't know the architecture of anything past a 586 very well, I seriously doubt anything Transmeta makes could do as much in a single clock cycle as a G4 or a Pentium 4.
A look at the system requirements for most of the games I see my little brother playing suggests that there's quite a ways to go before the technology would be popular with the game industry.
A look at the system requirements for most of the games I see my little brother playing suggests that there's quite a ways to go before the technology would be popular with the game industry.
Dev hardware used is rarely up to snuff anyways, main idea is to make sure code doesn't crash, I said dev hardware not test hardware.:-D
A VIA C3... you can get it on an EPIA board for about a tenth the price of Transmeta's eval board, natch.
Re:national semi?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Whatever guy, you have obviously never tried a G4.
Re:national semi?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ever run Windows with nothing installed on it? It's like greased lightning. Same concept with the Mac. There's just not enough good software to run on the thing. (Now's where you post a list of big-name software to prove me wrong)... but it's still a Mac. Their new advertising campaign? It's what they should've done years ago... take the PC on head-on. But they didn't.... and it's why they are where they are today. Relegated to classrooms, and fighting to hang onto the artists of the world. Apple... Think Different? Nah... Think Dead.
The cache is unified, very much like a Duron. I don't think it's as effective as the Duron design though for various reasons. The chip is a bit slow, but it runs cool and really is pretty good for a lot of tasks - a good "slow" chip.
If you can wait a few months, the C4 will have 256K 16-way L2 and much better multimedia performance.
so is transmeta dying?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
transmeta faces a bleak future. intel and amd just keep one-upping each other on every new generation of chips. i don't think transmeta is viable to fill any niche in the market right now. let's face it, transmeta is dying.
Re:so is transmeta dying?
by
Warped-Reality
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· Score: 0, Troll
Sorry, I can't resist... It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: TRANSMETA is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered TRANSMETA community when recently IDC confirmed that TRANSMETA accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that TRANSMETA has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. TRANSMETA is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Torvald [amdest.com] to predict TRANSMETA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: TRANSMETA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for TRANSMETA because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for TRANSMETA. As many of us are already aware, TRANSMETA continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, TRANSMETA went out of business and was taken over by INTEL who sell another troubled CHIP. Now INTEL is also dead(!), its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that TRANSMETA has steadily declined in market share. TRANSMETA is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If TRANSMETA is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. TRANSMETA continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, TRANSMETA is dead.
Fact: TRANSMETA is dead!
-- This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Re:so is transmeta dying?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
don't you love when moderators don't get jokes? If you don't think it's funny LEAVE IT ALONE.
-------- -dire
Re:so is transmeta dying?
by
Dehumanizer
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· Score: 1
Hopefully soon...It'd rock if they took M$ with them.
Re:Monopoly
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The comedy value and quality of your posting is almost as good as your website. Piss-poor. M$? You must be due for a karma fix after you've played crumpet rack with the slashteam.
5 years ago or so? IBM and Sun are arch-enemies; HP is usually considered just as "that printer company", not as worthwhile an opponen (at least if you believe McNealy).
--
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Microsoft profits have doubled, and sales have soared. Don't think they're going anywhere soon. Where is this 'End of the Microsoft Era' Jon Katz told us it was two years ago?
--
"Information wants to be paid"
Their final humilation
by
Jonny+Ringo
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· Score: 4, Funny
No word on whether there were any penguins seen leaving the building.
That was the punishment for not being profitable. Not only were the 200 employees fired, but they were forced to where penguin suites as they were escorted out.
Re:Their final humilation
by
DarkHelmet
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· Score: 2
I'm somehow reminded of the Stonecutters episode of the simpsons. They were going to fire Linus, but then realized that he's responsible for half of the press of their company.
CEO: Remove the Penguin suit of shame! Linus: Woohoo! CEO: Present the Penguin suit of triumph.
(Minions carry out suit twice as big)
Linus: Doh!
-- /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Re:Their final humilation
by
DaPhoenix
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· Score: 1
"...to where penguin suites..."?!?!?!
or..
"...to wear pengiun suits..."
sometimes it pays to click preview and reread after a spellcheck.;)
-- --
-=innocent ramblings from the mind of an insomniatic programmer=-
Re:Their final humilation
by
TurdFurgeson
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· Score: 0
oh man... is that all you have to add? you wrote to correct a spelling error?
Actually, the lads marching out dressed up as flightless birds weren't Transmetites - they were just the staff from next door company leaving for lunch. Now what was that other company called again... hmm, oh yes, Transvesta!
--
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Re:Shifted its goals?
by
mooman
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A lot of smaller companies focus more on obtaining market share. Plus remember all the dot-com Superbowl commercials? I think they are pretty much intended for branding and establishing market identity, sometimes at great cost.
So technically these companies may have to make a conscious effort to focus on profits rather than marketing and growth...
-- In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
What were the initial goals??? And here I tought the goal of all businesses was to make money.
Business (especially big business) forgot that in the 90s. There's an old mantra that says, "Make a little profit everyday." Many businesses in the tech sector spend huge ammounts of money when they start-up, then find themselves playing catch-up for the rest of their (short) lives. This is IMO what happened with the dot-coms.
Myself, I understand there is a need to sink money into developing technologies early in their lives so you can control how they mature and then control how you bring them to market so that the result is best for your company. With that said, if you're constantly borrowing money to make payroll while waiting on that next big break to come along, you're never going to make it.
Disclaimer:I an not a fortune 500 comapny's CEO, an economics teacher, or (currently) a heavy investor in the market. Take everything Is ay with a grain of salt.
-- Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Re:Shifted its goals?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"A lot of smaller companies focus more on obtaining market share"
In "The Practice of Management" (1954 but still very relevant) Peter Drucker says that the goal of business is to obtain customers. Profitability follows from correctly managing towards this goal. It's weird but when I first read this it really struck me that he's right. From customers comes profit if the business is correctly managed and it's the customers you need to get if you want the profit.
Don't base your decision on the statistics of a sample of one. Go read newsgroups, boards, etc and see which boards have the features you need. Find out what you need regarding cpu cooling, power supply, and case cooling. FWIW, I have 2 Dual Athlon setups at home, both running on Tyan Tiger MP boards and totally stable. They run stable *because* I checked usenet, and bought the right components, and installed all the neccessary drivers.
-- I love going down to the elementary school, watching all the kids jump and shout, but they dont know I'm using blanks.
Re:Shifted its goals?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What were the initial goals??? And here I tought the goal of all businesses was to make money.
that was the 'old' economy. in the 'new' economy, that isnt important.
Re:Transmeta is the answer to a question
by
DrInequality
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I was asking the question, but they wouldn't sell
chips to me!
I always thought that it was a strange business model to develop something pretty cool and then lock it up and sell it only to restricted developers. Surely they should have set the price based on demand and how many of the suckers they could actually make.
Here I sit in my cube. My employers were late on payroll for the entire month of June (June 15 and June 28 checks came on July 5). They are now late on the July 15 check. Two consecutive "this company is in the shitter" stories on Slashdot. Me with about fourteen resumes out in the wild and not a single reply. Shit. At least I live in a pretty place.
-- The middle mind speaks!
Re:Fuck
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Count yourself lucky, since my company went under I've sent out over 175 SERIOUS resumes to positions I would be interested in (not dishwasher, garbageman, etc). 14 is nothing.
There are jobs up in the East Bay, my brother. They might not pay as well (although my new job actually pays a small bit more), but it's work.
Take my advice: find someplace and do your best to hide out for the next two years, even if it's not doing something groundbreaking. Remember: there's always the next time around the bubble.
-- Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Sorry. Seriously, though, if you're not rooted in too firmly, there are jobs out there if you're willing to move to them, especially in places with big defense companies (San Diego, various east coast cities, etc).
If you're stuck in the boonies, though, you've got problems -- the lack of fallback jobs is why I passed on a very well-paying job with a startup in Madison, WI, even though I really needed the work at the time and have family there. If you get laid off and are a niche-type worker, you're in trouble.
-- Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
The second line is good advice. Get a job. Any job. Don't matter how shitty. Hang on to it for dear life. Go to school. Hope that the next bubble will take advantage of your new skills.
Me, I'm working on mainframes and going to school to learn as much about AI as I can. I'm praying that my experience won't overshadow my eductation once my thesis is done. But, if it is, at least I can program on mainframes.
The first thing you need to do is send out more resumes. 14 does not even count as having started. Good luck as someone who just got done being employed at a shit company and now doing well I wish you the best.
--
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics.
Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Re:Fuck
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Bernard Shifman... so are you posting to/. now? Spamming your resume wasn't enough huh?
Re:Fuck
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yes, but I live in the middle of nowhere. The closest thing to me that resembles a city is Laramie, Wymoing. Heh
Where you live is not the problem, the problem is that you banked your future on linux, something that is given away for free!
You dumb fuck! You thought that you could make money by giving something away for free?
Your only solution is to become a MCSE, that's where the money is!
Re:Fuck
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Two words: Homeland Security. Get in with a government contractor doing security shit. There is TONS of money floating around in this new and exciting field of information technology security. The government is sorely lacking in almost all federal agencies and they need to get their shit together.
14 resumes? I hope you aren't looking around Chicago... When I was laid of in February I sent out nearly 1000 resumes. Every damn company within 100 miles got my resume.
I got 4 interviews and 2 offers... Hows that for reality? Hopefully the next boom isn't *too* far off.
Announce your availability on dice.com. Make sure to add comments building yourself up at the bottom of the form. This has been very helpful to me in the past but I do realize these are really tough times. Good luck.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Re:no need to update his resume
by
Dr_LHA
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· Score: 4, Funny
NAME: Linus Torvalds ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Linux
"Sorry Son - you're going to have to have a better resume than that if you want to work at Microsoft."
Re:no need to update his resume
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
good, yes. that is what he said
Re:no need to update his resume
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I dont think MS will think twice when given the opportunity to distract the main creator of their largest worry from doing more 'damage'.
Re:no need to update his resume
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The pathetic fact that Linux probably *is* Microsoft's largest worry says something about what a carefree lifestyle is being lived over in Redmond.
Re:no need to update his resume
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
NAME: Linus Torvalds ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Rewriting a portion of Unix.
Re:no need to update his resume
by
Compenguin
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· Score: 1
NAME: Linus Torvalds ACCOMPLISHMENTS: - Botched 2.4 VM replacement - "This code used to work until linus fucked it up" - commiting major code changes to the stable tree while ignoring doc patches - `innovative' tree management
There's a shock.
by
Skyshadow
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Despite the "celebrity" factor Linus brought to the place, their product just never panned out. It was a good idea, and hopefully some larger company will buy up their proprietary technology, but I don't see how Transmeta on their own ever could have made a run at capitalizing the chips in an already severely swamped market -- the barriers to entry were just too high.
Still, having been laid off twice last year, I wish all the former Transmetites the best. I hope Linus is able to find an interesting job after Transmeta folds -- otherwise, my company could use a good code jockey...
-- Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This is truly terrible news for Linux and the tech community in general. As the employer of Linux Torvalds, the world's greatest living programmer, Transmeta was the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. Now it's reputation is tarnished and it is but a (60%) shell of its former self.
However, this isn't completely unexpected, at least by me. We bought up a lot of TM's products on Day One because of the low power consumption and high value-add. But around Day Four we noticed a lot of problems. Specifically we found problems with code path regneration, bit concordance, executing lagging on the backend busses and even voltage differentiation. That kind of low quality product eventually brings a company down.
It's too bad that Linux will get caught in the crossfire and most likely go into a tailspin, but that's the trouble when Open Source programmers go into the commercial tech sphere.
Re:Disheartening
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Hey, nice trolling. Good use of buzzwords and concepts from the article -- this is almost art.
Re:Disheartening
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"the world's greatest living programmer"
Keep up the good work, fanboy.
Wonder if Torvalds was one of them...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
it would be sad, and something that would truly underscore the state of the economy...
Industry Wide
by
stoolpigeon
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· Score: 2, Informative
How many people did Intel just lay off?
I think it was like 4,000.
A smaller percentage but still significant.
.
-- It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Increased revenue by 82% from Q1
by
mocm
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why are all those articles so negative. Right now it looks like they overcame the production difficulties and are moving ahead with new costumers that are actually building notebooks with Crusoe CPUs. The U1 from Sony is the hihest selling notebook in Japan already and the Fujitsu P series is also selling well in the USA. With the upcoming HP tablet and the OQO, I would say they aren't doing so badly.
-- ***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Re:Increased revenue by 82% from Q1
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Right now it looks like they overcame the production difficulties and are moving ahead with new costumers that are actually building notebooks with Crusoe CPUs.
You win! Typo of the week!
Re:Increased revenue by 82% from Q1
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You are SO naive.
What do you think they are going to say?
"We see this layoff as a small step on the way to our ultimate goal of total insolvency. There is little doubt that we will continue to dissapoint in spite of our best efforts, but we hope that we can keep at it for another few quarters until we run out of cash."
AC --
Re:Increased revenue by 82% from Q1
by
ostiguy
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· Score: 2
the register today said that sony is moving towards intel for those ultrasmall lappies
Transmeta never made much sense to me. People buy laptops for portability. They buy new laptops for speed. Most could give a rip about battery life or heat. Transmeta did not offer enough speed, and their ability to run in a sealed case (heat) would have only been nice for medical or industrial niches; but only if every other component on the system could be made water-tight and shock-proof as well. Their morph-code technology wasn't as desired; look at how many people don't even flash their BIOS.
Re:Goals of the company
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Planesdragon
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Most could give a rip about battery life or heat.
You, sir, use a laptop as a portable, not a laptop.
Battery life is *more* important than processor speed, to me. Were I in the market for a new lappytop, I'd want something that I could use for a several hour stretch in the park, in the car, or just wherever the feng shui is best for writing.
Once it can run the word processor and MP3 player at once, at a speed I don't cringe at, I'm happy & the rest is just gravy.
Re:Goals of the company
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Practically everyone I know has a laptop, and their laptops don't last over 2, maybe 3 hours (if they aren't doing anything with it) on a battery.
Then they see me working on my Fujitsu P Series for at least four hours at a time, and constantly ask me, "How much did that cost again? I want one."
Re:Goals of the company
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
My iBook lasts for close to 5 hours -- doing programming, listening to music, and keeping a browser open (for docs).
The thing really makes me happy I bought it.
Re:Goals of the company
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MikeBabcock
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· Score: 2
You may not give a rip about battery life, but all the people I see at the airport with a dozen laptop batteries in their laptop bags sure do.
Re:Goals of the company
by
IIRCAFAIKIANAL
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
How could you mention feng shui, brag about your belief in a western mythology and yet get modded as insightful? Someone needs to read some Randi
Hey, my first flame, yay for me:)
-- Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Re:Goals of the company
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
How can we know that? It's fucking *hard* to find a laptop that's made for portability. Most retailers don't even stock a single laptop that's designed for good battery life. Like with PCs, they just try to sell based on shoving a few large numbers on the specs.
Oh look! Pentium 4 2.4ghz 392 meg ram 80 gig hard drive! Must be good! Never mind that you can only run the fucking thing for 2 hours on battery.
How could you mention feng shui, brag about your belief in a western mythology and yet get modded as insightful?
Probably because those things were irrelevant, and the posting was actually insightful.
I'm using a Crusoe-based laptop right now. It weighs about 3 pounds, gets about 7 hours of battery life in real life use. I may have bought it a little early (before they get heavily discounted if the Crusoe is discontinued), but maybe I've got a collector's item here!
The fact is, it's nice to have a laptop small enough to carry with me all the time. It's about the speed of a 500 MHz PIII, and that's fast enough for just about anything I'd want to do on it. I used it to build the Windows distribution of a well-known statistical software package. If I'd had a machine that was 3 times faster, I probably wouldn't have had it with me to do that build.
The on reason i am not buying a laptop, the short batery life!
I need atleast 8 hours or more, i cant cope with 3-5 hours come one, meaning you cant go out camping for a day or two three and use your laptop for some time, unless you take loads of spare bats with you..
Laptops SUCK! damn it..
Re:Goals of the company
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
Big deal. I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 and it weighs about 5lbs and gets 5 hours out of each battery (two batteries) for a total of 10 hours of uninterrupted work. The speed is a PIII-600 that drops down to 500MHz while on battery (because I want it to, I could set it not to). This is all using Intel Speedstep technology.. no need for proprietary chips from some noname processor company.
Re:Goals of the company
by
sql*kitten
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Their morph-code technology wasn't as desired; look at how many people don't even flash their BIOS.
The real problem with code morphing is that why would anyone pay for morphing code to x86 when x86 processors are so widely available? Now if they'd had the ability to code morph x86 to native *and* the ability to code morph the instruction set of (say) the Java Virtual Machine to native, then maybe we'd be talking. All the advantages of Java, but executing at native speed, plus compatibility with all x86 applications, and maybe SPARC too. Then they could have simply sold the company to Sun for it's next attempt at thin-client desktops. But what was the point of code morphing to only one target? This is something the VCs should have asked before investing a single dollar.
Re:Goals of the company
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Jungle+guy
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· Score: 1
Heat is important if your are going to put the laptop in your lap.
Intel and AMD seem to be fighting for the fastest processor, and that is good, but in a portable computer heat and battery life are important.
We are getting to a point where regular coolers aren't going to be enough for Pentium 4 or Athlon XP. Toshiba is testing a water-cooled notebook, due to increased heat produced by high-end processors. It is good that a company care about heat and battery life. I don't want a super fast notebook processor to run a spread sheet or a text editor. Applications that require serious number crunching are better off in a desktop or a server.
Re:Goals of the company
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Once it can run the word processor and MP3 player at once, at a speed I don't cringe at, I'm happy & the rest is just gravy.
Problem is that this is not how the general market works. I'm a heavy user of Office products (sorry), and I recently made a sincere effort to buy a Crusoe-based product. All I could find were undersized laptops that may be fitting on a Tokyo underground, but were too low-powered (in terms of screen resolution, disk space, memory, keyboard size, etc) to work as my travelling companion.
One thing is for technology to look good on paper, another is to get it into the market in a way that allows customers to actually buy it, and where it brings actual incremental value. Crusoe never got that far.
The real problem is that the Crusoe came too early. If their target market is the new generation of ultra-light (e.g. wireless mobile web devices), then the big market will appear when products such as the iPaq can run full XP (x86 code base), thereby leveraging their ability to run things like Explorer and Flash. I think web-pad-style devices (a.k.a. internet appliances) are in the future, in a big way, but the technology is not quite there yet.
Like Linley Gwennap said back in early 2000: "Where [the Crusoe] is more fundamentally interesting is in these new emerging devices like the Web pad and others. The market is not very big today. People have been looking for the right technology. This could be a catalyst [for] the Web pad and these emerging devices."
The Crusoe may well in the future be seen as the catalyst, but it appears as if the market will appear too late to help Transmeta.
And being a little too early with a new technology is a fully respectable reason to fail.
Big deal. I have a Dell Inspiron 4000 and it weighs about 5lbs and gets 5 hours out of each battery (two batteries) for a total of 10 hours of uninterrupted work.
If I wanted to buy extra batteries, I could just buy 10, and get 70 hours battery life. That's not how it works. You can claim 5 hours battery life, not 10. My Crusoe does 40% better, weighs 40% less, and runs at the same speed.
This is all using Intel Speedstep technology.. no need for proprietary chips from some noname processor company.
Right, mine doesn't have the Intel corporate logo on it. Must be no good.
Well, it DOES work like that when the laptop can hold multiple batteries at once. The Dell can hold the 2 he mentioned. Yours can't. He can legitimately claim 10 hours battery life, I'd like ot see you cram 10 batteries into your ultralight.
Well, it DOES work like that when the laptop can hold multiple batteries at once. The Dell can hold the 2 he mentioned. Yours can't.
Actually, mine can. I was talking about 7 hours of usable time with both batteries installed.
I guess I misunderstood the AC. Dell's website says that each battery in an Inspiron 4150 gives 2 hours service, not 5. (Maybe the 4000 is 2.5 times better.)
But really, you shouldn't trust web sites. The one for my laptop claims 10.5 hours with the battery configuration I'm using, and it's an exaggeration. I've just never seen a case where a manufacturer understated the battery life by 60%.
What I was referring to was your statement that you could buy 10 batteries and get 70 hours of battery life. That would involve turning off the computer to swap the batteries, whereas in his dual setup, both batteries are in the laptop at once. By my standards, a laptop's maximum battery life is its battery life with every battery it can fit into its case. I doubt your Transmeta laptop can hold 10 batteries, so that's why I took issue with your statement. That's not to say I agree with the original poster, I find it quite amusing to see someone refer to Intel technology as standard and call the others proprietary.
--
Nicotine free Amish.sig.
Re:Talk to you all later.
by
b0bd0bbs
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· Score: 0, Troll
"It's better to burn out than to fade away." -- Kurt Cobain
FYI Neil Young said it first.
He would turn them down just like he would turn down jobs from any major commercial player in the GNU/Linux community to avoid giving them an unfair advantage.
I don't think he would work for hardware companies like AMD, Intel and VIA either for the same reason: people might think that the stuff manufactured by the company he was working for was "better" for GNU/Linux.
He's quite a principled bloke and I think he can afford to be choosy.:o)
It would be a good idea if several of the commercial companies pushing GNU/Linux got together and chipped in a bit each month to keep him working on Linux.
That's the story. IBM is bungling their Linux effort. I'm not suprised, look at their recent track record; AIX/386, PowerPC, OS/2, their hardisk divison..
Overflow of workers go where?
by
totallygeek
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· Score: 2
Do the folks from Transmeta try to find jobs with chip manufacturers like Intel, AMD, IBM, or Texas Instruments; or, do they look for software jobs? Who got canned; which division? I looked for more information, and couldn't find any.
Re:Overflow of workers go where?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I'm a software guy and will look for work in the software industry and try to stay clear of hardware companies for the rest of my life. I'm sure most other software people will follow this same rule.
The hardware business is just plain harder than the software business because of the limited lifespan of practically all hardware designs. Software on the other hand can easily live forever.
Re:Overflow of workers go where?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Go where? I think they're called "homeless shelters".
Re:Overflow of workers go where?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The limited lifespan of hardware designs is
actually a good reason for software folks
to align themselves with the hardware industry:
the need for new drivers is never-ending.
Ditzel should be behind bars
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
He told investors he would deliver a chip that ran at the same speed and used one-fourth the power of an Intel chip, but instead he delivered a chip that ran at half the speed and used half the power of Intel's. Certainly nothing to brag about.
Re:Ditzel should be behind bars
by
nelsonal
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· Score: 2, Informative
And the idiots who believed him and threw money his way should have looked at financials or at least waited until customers showed up. They didn't go public untill well after the peak, so there shouldn't have been the mad rush for shares that locked you out at a reasonable price if you didn't get in in the first five minutes. Transmeta had a total of 3,817,000 in revenues for the nine months prior to it going public, and 76,670,000 in expenses for the same period! People over subscribed the IPO to buy a 1/127,752,858th of that at $21.00, even worse the could have sold it for 40somehthing a share at the end of the first day! Your share of revenues (sales) would be about 3 cents. This was an excellent candidate for another round of venture funding.
BRThere is an old saying from wall street, Bulls make money, bears make mone, pigs get butchered. Perhaps we should continue to heed that when the next big thing gets hot.
-- Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Weather or not he should behind bars is arguable, but to anyone investing in Transmeta, buying into a company which has a boat load of debt and some queries over the financials (IIRC, the former financial director quit shortly before the IPO) is not good.
Transmeta went public far too early (could be pressure from the VC funders). The technology was untried then and certainly there were a number of issues to be solved.
As regards your quote about bears making no money, haven't you heard about selling short?
Re:Ditzel should be behind bars
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Sorry, poor editing on my part. That should be, "bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get butchered."
Transmeta has all kinds of support...
by
codejester
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· Score: 1
People keep saying no support exists for the product but look at the hardware using the chips. Myself, can't wait to get my new Picturebook...
Re:Transmeta has all kinds of support...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Only 90% of those things have been discontinued due to lack of interest and performance.
hey, thanks for the spot
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
wanker
Re:hey, thanks for the spot
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Go fuck yourself, loser. You suck more than a five-buck whore.
I suppose it would be selfish...
by
Tsugumi
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· Score: 1
...to hope Transmeta does fold so Linus can devote all of his time to Linux when it's at such a critical point. He'd need to earn a wage, but I'm sure there would be support for a Linux Development fund a la Perl. And he wouldn't be short of consultancy/lecture jobs.
Re:I suppose it would be selfish...
by
Ziviyr
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· Score: 1
Yes it would be selfish, since Transmeta hasn't quite become a repackager of old tech.
If he worked at some plastic brain-drain toy for infants company I'd be enthusiastically behind you.
I guess a Windows CD would count as a plastic brain-drain toy.:-) (*cough*karmawhore*cough*)
--
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Re:I suppose it would be selfish...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I'm sure there would be support for a Linux Development fund a la Perl
Er, I think what we learned is that there is no support for a Perl development fund.
Re:I suppose it would be selfish...
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joepa
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· Score: 1
Should we go ahead and setup a PayPal account now?
MOD PARENT DOWN - troll link w/Javascript popups
by
Chad+Page
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· Score: 1, Informative
Thank goodness Linux has virtual consoles, so I could kill the process outside of the GUI...;)
- Chad
How long have they got?
by
Anne_Nonymous
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· Score: 4, Interesting
$180mm of cash and near-cash, and $25mm of burn this quarter (+/- depending how you count), gives them a life expectancy of two years. I suspect we'll see a catalyst one way or the other before then though.
Not that big a deal
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
As for the 'penguins leaving the building', I might be able to give some good news (or not) to the guy. I'm still at Transmeta.
Like a lot (most?) of other companies in the business Transmeta has suffered. We've suffered just enough, IMO. We still exist and have a healthy profitable future. Crusoe processors are getting widespread, even outside the Japanese market where they were and still are king.
Essentially, some people from non-vital positions were the victim of a what happens in the general economy, and I feel for them. But the vital teams were untouched.
There will be no change whatsoever in my duties as kernel development maintainer of the odd series, I'll just keep on doing that as I've always have. No need to worry.
Re:Not that big a deal
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Here's the deal. If the company just couldn't live without you: vital. Otherwise: non-vital.
By definition, anyone laid off was, in the company's opinion, non-vital.
Re:Not that big a deal
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I might be able to give some good news... I'm
still at Transmeta.
This reminds me of the old saying, "A recession is when your neighbor loses her job, a depression is
when you lose yours!"
Did somebody read something that I didn't? I didn't see Linus mentioned anywhere in the article. Nor did I see anything specifically saying that Transmeta was going under. Yes, these are both posibilities, but not it seems that some of us are kinda jumping to conclusions.
my $.02 (which is actually less than.02 Euro as of this writing) mrdogi
Sorry for my previous posting being done anonymous, I didn't have my account ID handy, didn't use it for (quite) a while.
As for the 'penguins leaving the building', I might be able to give some good news (or not) to the guy. I'm still at Transmeta.
Like a lot (most?) of other companies in the business Transmeta has suffered. We've suffered just enough, IMO. We still exist and have a healthy profitable future. Crusoe processors are getting widespread, even outside the Japanese market where they were and still are king.
Essentially, some people from non-vital positions were the victim of a what happens in the general economy, and I feel for them. But the vital teams were untouched.
There will be no change whatsoever in my duties as kernel development maintainer of the odd series, I'll just keep on doing that as I've always have. No need to worry.
Re:No big deal
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
Not to offend one of my Idols. But if you are really linus why don't you have at least PGP sing. So we can tell if it's really you.
Re:No big deal
by
God!+Awful
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This isn't linus. His last name is spelled "Torvalds" NOT "Thorvals". Just a troll begging for attention.
Unless he got locked out of his previous account and couldn't get back in (because the e-mail address is way out of date) so he had to create a new account. If you look at the account info, notice that this was the first time it was used, and subsequent postings do nothing to suggest that this was a troll.
ive been looking around for the SEC filings. does anybody know where i can find them? i checked cnbc.com and datek.com (which uses cbs market watch) but they just have the 1st quarter results.
NAME: Anders Hejlsberg
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Turbo Pascal/Delphi
The Empire found a spot for him and now we have to wade through C#. I dare not imagine what Linus Torvalds inflict on us if he went over to the Dark Side.
I can see that C# has its failings, but they are pretty nit picking type failings compared to C. The use of pointers by itself renders whole programs unreadable unless one wants to spend a long time understanding the implications of every line of code.
To say that implicit type conversion in C is well understood and clear, and that in C# isn't, is just a joke. C has an incredibly complex time converting between types, nade all the more complex because types can vary between underlying machine architectures.
--
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
On the other hand, considering C# was influenced greatly by Java, it is evident that many of the so called "enhancements" that were introduced in C# really are not enhancements at all, but only additional syntactic sugar that have not been completely thought through, add unnecessary side effects, and hinder maintenance of C# software with unneeded complexity.
Re:Anders Hejlsberg
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You mean like operator overloading and method versioning? Perhaps you meant stack alloc'd types? Definitely unproven "syntactic sugar" to say the least:-/ I'd be pleased to hear your insight, how do those new features create side effects or add complexity if you are not forced to use them? (Don't reply if you're not going to answer the question.) Also, have you ever written *anything* in C#, at all?
Updates?
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Can somebody tell me where I can get updates to the code morphing software? I remember reading that there would be code updates, but I haven't seen any and I have no clue whatsoever where to find them.
New YORK (CNN) - Intel Corp. Tuesday said it will
eliminate roughly 4,000 jobs in the second half of the year
after reporting a second-quarter profit that fell short of
recently reduced estimates.
Executives of the world's largest chipmaker also provided a
cautious outlook for the third quarter and the remainder of the
year, as large corporations continue to curtail their information technology spending
amid economic uncertainty.
Why didn't Slashdot report this news item, hhmmmmm?
The subject line is incorrect. Intel did not and has not said it would "fire 4000 employees". It said it wants to reduce the number of employees by 4000 by the end of the year through attrition and divestiture AND "redeployment" (Intel's term for layoffs). There are not 4000 Intel employees being handed pink slips.
I don't doubt that there will be layoffs at Intel through the end of this year, but I expect them to be relatively small in number. More important, the core silicon business (known as "Job 1" inside Intel), will likely remain untouched.
The biggest insult is that at least when I pulled up the story (this may be a random advirtisment) but the ad that is almost as big as the story is for Gateways new line of laptops featureing, you guessed it the P4 from, you guessed it Intel.
Re:Biggest Insult
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I got it too.
Transmeta Does Not Have to Die
by
Louis+Savain
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· Score: 2
Transmetta does not have to die. They need to focus on the two biggest problems in the computer industry: unreliability and low productivity. If they can come up with a solution that can bring at least an order of magnitude improvement in both productivity and reliability, they can kick both Intel's and Microsoft's asses.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we develop software and the way we design our CPUs to execute the software that we develop. There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. It has to do with the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software development.
We need a new software construction paradigm, one which is based on signals. Transmeta has the golden opportunity to do something real cool and save lives in the process. More can be found at the links below.
Re:Transmeta Does Not Have to Die
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. It has to do with the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software development."
It has to do with programmers calling themselves engineers and developers rather than programmers. It has to do with these same people demanding high salaries for sitting in meetings and not coding. It has to do with poorly designed ideas for software that no one wants - because no one paid attention to the customer's demands in the first place. Most software is ill-conceived and based on the whims of a programmer and not that of the needs of the customer.
Re:Transmeta Does Not Have to Die
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You might get that impression by living in the Linux world where you would be right. Course you could come out of the basement any time. Were waiting here for you with open arms! (If not open software)
Re:Transmeta Does Not Have to Die
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They don't have to die. But they might as well. No one cares. There is no need for them at all, if there was, they'd be raking it in. They are irrelevant. I wish they would die for a couple of reasons. One, no more "Transmeta is great and the future of the universe" stories on/. Second. Maybe Linus could actually get some real work done on the kernel that is lagging severely in development and bug fixing.
Re:Transmeta Does Not Have to Die
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Um, man WHAT have you been smoking? How is a processor going to save programmers? Duh? And good luck in convincing sane people that instead of algorithms one needs to process signals, and that will make as all a big happy family? Who cares what the processor eats, its the compiler that compiles programs, and there isn't anything particularly processor specific in modern programming languages.
Ok everyone, sorry, I'm ashamed, shouldn't make fun of sick people who have forgot to take their pill.
to post stories about I.T. companies that *not* laying off.
Uh, where have you been? There are plenty of stories about that company isn't there?
--
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
portability, performance & battery life are li
by
Gumber
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· Score: 3, Informative
battery life and heat are interrelated, and have significant influence on the portability and speed of a laptop.
heat is what battery charge ends up as, so these are obviously directly related.
The portability of a laptop is largely influenced by its weight, and to a lesser degree, size. The battery is one of the heaviest and largest single components in a laptop (after the screen). So, a processor that draws significantly less power for a given level of performance allows the use of a significantly smaller and lighter battery pack, resulting in a more portable computer.
The performance of a laptop is, of course, by the performance of its processor. In a laptop heat dissipation and battery life conspire often force a practical limit on the processor. A more efficient processor, that demands less power, and therefore dissipates less heat, will allow a faster processor to be used in a given machine.
Oh, wait. This is a troll, isn't it. Oh well.
HOLD ON JUST A MINUTE
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Intel has been profitable every single quarter, and has not layed anyone off. Intel stopped hiring, paid volinteers 6 months salery and gave them all their unvested options to quit, and paid people 3 months salery not to take jobs Intel offered them. Intel has no plans to lay anyone off.
Re:HOLD ON JUST A MINUTE
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Ehh - wrong. I live in Oregon where the layoffs are happening. While they are generally being helpful with placing people in new positions etc people are really losing their jobs here.
And this doesn't even count temporary employees, because Intel's policy has always been temporary employees are expenses - not people.
I wish people would see this every time Intel runs a "Intel is a good neighbor to Oregon" commercial.
Besides - last may (2001) they annouced they were laying off 5000 people.
Re:HOLD ON JUST A MINUTE
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Are you in FSM or one of the side buisneses? I know we are eliminating the ISP unit.
We have eliminated the temps here in Arizona, but that is why they are called temps!
Re:Talk to you all later.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I thought it was Def Leppard.
typical interview
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
We will need the exact date and time you were hired and layed off, your supervisor's name and title, all your high school attendence records, your mothers maiden name.... can you actually do anything? No, sir we don't need to know that... but we will need a list of every class you took in college, your gpa, the length of your tongue, your race and gender, 5 references, notarize form B, sign here here and here....
Exactly!
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Why is this unique or surprising? Outside the empty politico rhetoric about a non-existant economic recovery, everything is sliding nicely down the toilet right now.
Transmeta is letting 40% go. What about Intel? Intel is dumping 4000 of their own. Look around, the story repeats.
Things aren't pretty anywhere. That Transmeta is hurting isn't a surprise. Neither is it a surprise all of the "Duh, I never understood Transmeta/Transmeta had no real business plan" responses to this article here.:/
Slashdot is looking a lot like Fscked Company.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
When did Pud take over as editor?
Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
Animats
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The trouble with Transmeta was that the feature people wanted was fine-grained power management, not software translation into microcode. Transmeta was first with fine-grained power management, but as soon as it became clear that people cared about that, everybody else (i.e. Intel and AMD) started doing it, and Transmeta lost the only advantage it had.
Transmeta's "code morphing" turned out to be another Really Neat Computer Architecture Idea that Doesn't Matter. It goes to the graveyard with stack machines, tagged-word machines, capability machines, dataflow machines, single-instruction multiple-datastream machines, hypercube machines, and Forth machines. Each of those has been made to work, built, and sold. Few people have ever seen any of then, but they all did exist as working commercial hardware at one time or another. None of them had enough of an advantage over vanilla architecture to survive.
The same thing will probably happen to Intel's Itanium, which, even within Intel, is considered a marginal idea.
In a way, it's sad. We're stuck with vanilla architecture like x86 and vanilla languages like C. There are many better approaches, but none better enough that the pain of conversion is worth it.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
MisterBlister
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· Score: 2
I agree.. except for SIMD. SIMD on its own might not have amounted to much, but SSE2/3DNOW etc are a great success.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
We still use dataflow machines, sort of. At work we use a dataflow language (not related to C in any form whatsoever), that targets itself to FPGA. So when you're done, you basically have a dataflow CPU. In fact we don't use C anymore, just one guy doing things old-school with assembly, the rest of us have been lucky enough to be let in on a little secret of the programming world. BTW, I still have a FORTH machine in the garage, with manuals and everything.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
iabervon
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Stack machines... you mean, like the Java Virtual Machine? Or PostScript printers? Nope, nobody using that idea any more. Actually, a number of the neat old ideas in computers turn out to be great for something somewhat different, or somewhat later. Stack machines are a great idea if you don't know how many registers you have. With real machines running compiled software, this is stupid; but for virtual machine or for document-formatting instructions, it's great.
In any case, it's not neat ideas that sell machines, it's solved problems. Code morphing is a great idea, and it'll be really big as soon as someone wants to do something that it's good for.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Transmeta's "code morphing" turned out to be another Really Neat Computer Architecture Idea that Doesn't Matter. It goes to the graveyard with stack machines, tagged-word machines, capability machines, dataflow machines, single-instruction multiple-datastream machines, hypercube machines, and Forth machines. Each of those has been made to work, built, and sold. Few people have ever seen any of then, but they all did exist as working commercial hardware at one time or another. None of them had enough of an advantage over vanilla architecture to survive.
I'm not sure what you mean by capability machines (if you mean capability based security mechanisms, that is making a revival, I think Linux uses it in the Kernel, and other O.S.'s like Eros might become more influential).
SIMD is still around in vector based instructions as described by the other poster.
Data flow and pipelined architectures are being seen more at the instruction level parellelism than at the high level.
In short, many HPC tricks are out there, but are employed in the low level logic, and not at the highest level.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
Animats
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· Score: 2
SSE2/3DNOW/MMX/etc...
Those just reuse existing hardware with the registers split up a little differently - 8 8-bit operands instead of one 64 bit one, or 2 32-bit floats instead of one 64-bit one. Big-scale SIMD, like the Connection Machine, where one operation was applied to 1024 data items simultaneously, doesn't turn out to be that useful. Beating the problem into a form where you can apply the all-at-once SIMD hammer turns out to be more trouble than it is worth.
Capability machines...
The capability machine people have a terribly hard time explaining how their idea works. I've known several people involved in such work, including Norm Hardy, and
I had hopes for EROS, but it's not going anywhere.
The problem is writing applications that can effectively use these complex security architectures. Capabilities are a low-level mechanism; you have to build a system and a policy on top of them, and demonstrate that the policy is secure. This is hard.
Agreed that data flow machines exist down where the work gets done inside the CPU. The Pentium Pro and its successors are all dataflow machines deep inside. But the data flow architecture isn't exposed to the programmer.
There are some exotic architectures in game consoles, the PS2 being the fanciest one.
Graphics and signal processing pipelines often have wierd machines. But those are special-purpose applications where some tiny inner loop is executed over and over.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
Louis+Savain
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· Score: 2
In a way, it's sad. We're stuck with vanilla architecture like x86 and vanilla languages like C. There are many better approaches, but none better enough that the pain of conversion is worth it.
I disagree. There is a better approach to software construction and execution that can bring at least an order of magnitude improvement in reliability and productivity. We are in the middle of a crisis because there is something fundamentally wrong in the way we develop software. The root cause of the problem is as old as Lady Ada and Charles Babbage. It is the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Fortunately we don't have to live with it.
This is a golden opportunity for Transmeta (or any struggling chip and software company) to redefine software engineering and computing as we know it. They can do the right thing and leave Microsoft, Intel and AMD in the dust. Details at the links below.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
AnimalSnf
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· Score: 1
Right, marginal ideas.
I will leave the rest of posters do deal will all instances in which many of those machines have found uses or even shapped the industry. My gripe is the assertion that x86 vanilla plain, because that is as far as you can get from the truth.
Even if you've never done assembly in x86 just the description of the hardware from sites like Tom's should send shivers down your spine. First, consider the fact that the x86 architecture is almost 30 years old. First there was the 4004, on which the IA for the 8088 was based. Now, dumb the 8088 down a little and you get 8086. Then you add some 32 bit instructions and 2 more modes for the 80286 and 80386. Sounds fine, but now we move the Floating Point Unit (someone say stack) on the chip and make some improvements for the 80486. Pentium is pretty big change, so lets save the introduction of SIMD (that would be the dead Single Instruction Multiple Data) for the Pentium MMX. Well, Pentium Pro is a completely different architecture on the inside, uops and all, so let's release Pentium II and wait to release the improved SIMD instruction set till Pentium III. Wait a second, Pentium III is getting it's ass kicked by the Athlon, that now has 2 of it's own SIMD instruction sets. So. let's add those and a third set, call it SSE2, hope it does something usefull, and in the mean time redesign the whole thing so at least it looks like it runs applications faster. Wellcome Pentium IV. Now, try to learn all those instruction and how to use them without having you PC run cripling slow and tell me it's not convoluted.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
hoggy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Stack machines... you mean, like the Java Virtual Machine? Or PostScript printers? Nope, nobody using that idea any more.
No, I think the OP meant that nobody is building actual stack-based processors anymore. The JVM is a virtual machine, and PostScript printers contain an interpreter running on a conventional processor (usually a RISC chip). Other than Sun's brief fling with the Java processor, stack machines have pretty much died.
Code morphing is a great idea, and it'll be really big as soon as someone wants to do something that it's good for.
Code morphing is a great idea indeed. But it already is in use in any JIT emulator or virtual machine. Crusoe is basically a very power-efficient processor running an x86 JIT emulator.
The big unanswered question is whether VLIW was a good idea or not...
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Informative
VLIW is a great idea for certain application domains.. like DSP, some multimedia stuff etc. and has been very succesful in these domains.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
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Ian+Bicking
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· Score: 2
X18 is an example of a modern-day stack machine (also a Forth machine -- forth and stacks are pretty much the same thing). It's in contrast to the register-based design of traditional chips.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
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BShive
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· Score: 1
Great success by what standard? Just because every chip has it doesn't mean it's a "success" when there's 2 manufacturers.
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
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sigwinch
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· Score: 2
The trouble with Transmeta was that the feature people wanted was fine-grained power management, not software translation into microcode.
Depends on your point of view. I consider controlling the CPU core voltage and clock speed as rather coarse grained.
Transmeta's "code morphing" turned out to be another Really Neat Computer Architecture Idea that Doesn't Matter.
No, it's a major advance in instruction decoding. Conventional IA-32 decoders are hardwired into transistors. They do perform extremely well, but at a very high cost in power and die area, and because they're hardwired it's difficult to design complex behavior. Hardwired logic giveth, but hardwired logic also taketh away. From a power point of view, they're very coarse grained: decoding instructions full-bore, or turned off. (And they have no sense of importance: code that runs for a microsecond every ten minutes is treated the same as the inner loop of a rendering algorithm.)
The Transmeta instruction decoder, on the other hand, is extremely fine-grained. It gives code the amount of attention it deserves. For rarely-executed code, the decoder wastes little power and does a suboptimal decoding. The more frequently code is executed, the more power the decoder burns to optimize it. Especially frequent decodings are cached so they can be used later with zero decoding. (Which hardwired decoders have a lot of trouble doing.)
The Transmeta decoder also has the potential for really neat tricks. E.g., you could put multiple ALUs and FPUs in the CPU, but leave them completely turned off except when a heavy-duty computational algorithm truly needs them. Ditto for power-hungry L1/2 caches. When your decoder is firmware, you can afford to try all sorts of things, and just not use them if it's too hard to get right, but complexity like that gives nightmares to the designers of hardwired decoders.
It goes to the graveyard with... single-instruction multiple-datastream machines...
You mean like IA-32?;-)
The same thing will probably happen to Intel's Itanium, which, even within Intel, is considered a marginal idea.
The latest Itanium 2 benchmarks look pretty good. With some more tweaking, I won't be surprised if the I2 will give the largest available computational throughput per CPU. I think technically it can be made to work well. The question is, how many people need absolute peak performance per CPU, die area, power consumption, and bus width be damned? I suspect that's a small market. Most people in the data serving and technical computing markets can just slap some more CPUs in their cluster if it's too slow. (And you can reasonably contemplate putting 500 Crusoes in a rack, and tossing the rack into some random warehouse. Equivalent Itanium power would be vastly more expensive and require a carefully-engineered cooling system.)
--
-- Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.;-)
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
kma
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· Score: 1
No, it's a major advance in instruction decoding. Conventional IA-32 decoders are hardwired into transistors. They do perform extremely well, but at a very high cost in power and die area, and because they're hardwired it's difficult to design complex behavior.
The Pentium 4's trace cache solves most of the headaches of IA32 decoding, for a meaninglessly small fraction of the effort of Transmeta's solution. Seems a bit more effective way of solving the problem than inventing a new implementation technique and doing the equivalent of a dozen or so PhD theses making it work, don't you think?
This whole "code-morphing is for power saving" line is a rather transparent rewriting of history on the part of Transmeta. At the time of Transmeta's founding, they clearly hoped that transparent, online software optimization would be so effective that they'd produce a much faster x86 than is otherwise possible. When it became clear that they'd underestimated x86 performance curves, they needed some reason for having spent all that money on Linus's salary. An almost random implementation side effect happened to consume less power than other x86 CPUs; so, the fiction that the world was clamoring for fractionally lower-power x86 cpus than are available from its competitors was invented.
I don't have any sort of privileged information about this; it just seems to fit the data well. How would a company whose business model is Transmeta's current one ever get founded, given that it involves two leaps of faith: first, that people want to buy low-power x86'es, and second, that this "code-morphing" jiggery-pokey will actually produce a low-power x86. It would be much easier to get started on the assumption that these things would actually be fast (which they clearly hoped), since there's a proven market for fast CPUs.
For this reason, people's borderline mysticism about "code-morphing" strikes me as strange, given that it remains a solution in search of a problem. It's just an implementation technique, folks. It's not even as fundamentally radical an implementation technique as it initially sounds; it's a slippery slope from microcode+trace cache to "code morphing." Does it build a faster CPU? Not nearly. Does it build a more power-conservant CPU? Just barely, and it's unclear the world cares as much as Transmeta want it to. So who gives a rat's ass? It sounds like a clever idea at first, but don't really clever ideas, like, accomplish stuff?
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
sigwinch
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· Score: 2
Very good points.
The P4 trace cache is cool, but (1) it's only 12Kops deep, and (2) it doesn't globally optimize, it just remembers. OTOH, if global optimization was easy we'd all be buying Itaniums.
I wouldn't underestimate the importance of low power design at the architectural level. If you could design a P4 1 GHz-equivalent computer that would fit in a shirt pocket and run 12 hours on a charge, you'd have a sales winner. And you will never be able to do that using the P4 or Itanium approaches (cache and prefetch the shit out of everything, and use the widest & fastest busses that can be fabbed and packaged). Smart portable devices are the future of computing, if for no other reason than the desktop market is saturating(ed).
Also, the fastest CPUs are rapidly approaching the propagation delay limit and pipelining is running out of steam (look at the absurd 20-stage pipeline of the P4). Past that limit, advances in throughput will come from parceling out work units to sub-CPUs. Transmeta's approach has some chance of untangling the dependencies and creating the work units, but a hardwired decoder is hopeless. I'd just say "SMP" (or ultrahypermegathreading buzzword of the week), but software designers have a poor history of moving beyond uniprocessor.
When it became clear that they'd underestimated x86 performance curves, they needed some reason for having spent all that money on Linus's salary.
I think it was the external bus they underestimated. If the CPU is a lot faster than its bus, there's a huge payback for reducing cache misses and stalls through optimization. So far Intel has (partially) defeated that problem by clever heuristics and big improvements in the bus, but the bus can only be improved so far. (When I first heard how the P4 was keeping the bus saturated to improve performance, I was shocked that they would resort to such a sledgehammer approach, and also shocked that that approach had a payback.) At some point the only solution will be intelligent prefetching. Worse luck for Transmeta, that point is probably several years in the future.
It's not even as fundamentally radical an implementation technique as it initially sounds; it's a slippery slope from microcode+trace cache to "code morphing."
No reasonable amount of P4 microcode will ever run Java, Python, or C#.;-) I seriously doubt that's what Transmeta was shooting for, but I'd pay through the nose for a machine that could do a Python VM opcode every 10 nanoseonds.
--
-- Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.;-)
Re:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
iabervon
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· Score: 2
As I said, hardware that you compile code for doesn't make sense as a stack machine. A stack machine is like a register machine with an unbounded number of semi-inconveniently named registers. This only makes sense if you don't want to specify how many registers you have. But you know how many registers a given chip will have, so you might as well say.
Actually, register windowing is somewhat like a stack machine; you have one stack/register, and you push or pop the whole window at once around function calls. Again, you want to hide the depth at which you spill into memory and pretend that the depth is infinite, so you use stack-machine-like semantics.
So there are hardware stack machines (sort of) pretending to be register machines and hardware register machines implementing stack machines, and even hardware stack machines pretending to be register machines running software emulation of stack machines.
On the code morphing front, Crusoe really ought to run java byte code as if it were native.
wouldn't it be better
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
..wouldn't it be better for this so called linux "community" to hire linus on a shareware basis? You don't think that millions of linux users could come up with a few thou a month minimum just to keep him coding kernel stuff? why should he work for any one company, anyway, ain't he valuable enough? this is an opportunity for the "linux" community to put a few meqsly bucks where their bragging mouths are every month. I'm pretty po now, semi retired, mostly a small fixed income, but I think I can pony up 10 bucks for linus to keep him in beer and rent. I've spent 10 bucks on just a single shareware app before! And bill gates has profited off me, steve jobs, joe ibm, motorola, yada yada yada-they all have gotten their cut over the years. I run linux now, so linus should get some of the loot, it was his baby, yes? And redhat and cheapie bytes have gotten some of my loot, why shouldn't the main brain get some, too? And for that matter, why don't all the major for-sale distros shoot him a few bucks monthly as well? wazzup with the cheapskate-itis deal?
I think he should try it, a simple paypal or kagi or whatever "shareware" adopt a (major) kernel hacker effort.
Re:wouldn't it be better
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Maybe. Except that has been tried and failed miserably about 100 times with various projects. But shit, Red Hat, SUSE and any other commercial Linux vendors aught to pay him a royalty if they had even the tiniest bit of respect or guilt over stealing and selling all that slave labor code.
Re:wouldn't it be better
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
--true, but this is linus we are talking about. not obscure_language_or_distro version.008alpha
maybe the concept should be tried 101 times, ya never know....
I only post as AC, if you are a real name, try an article or "ask slashdot" question why we couldn't do this? Best I could do is the initial 10 bucks-I'll even snail mail it cashola just to dick with uncle schumel some- and a real_crappy hand coded web page, heh
Intentionally ignoring your "shareware" reference; the GPL forbids that arrangement.
If you *really* want to give ca$h to linus, there's nothing and nobody stopping you from ponying up right now. Unless you wanted to wait until he was a destitute gutter rat. If you're in the U.S. it's easy to snailmail him a check (/usr/src/linux/CREDITS has the addr). I wonder if he would bother to deposit it..
I thought linus said he never wanted to work full time on Linux anyway. As if it would become Real Work then, or he would be accountable to somebody else for linux, or something.
Re:wouldn't it be better
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
This has been tried and failed with Perl developers and that's a large project. The funding always runs out and then they are up shit creek until they come around begging for more. Then everyone goes "huh? I already paid my $10 go away hippie linux faggot.. get a job like everyone else."
Welcome to the...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Welcome to the world of accounting and making your bottom line look good in the short term. Never mind that it will take you over a year to truly recover. All companies do this kind of stuff.
I realize attention spans are getting shorter....
by
fm6
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· Score: 2
...but this is ridiculous. Read the sentence again. The last two words change the entire meaning!
yes I think that they could have done or have done it
really this is software and the only thing that would limit them is some stupid restriction in the hardware (which they have not made) this means that the transmeta laptop now with a rom update is a 64bit machine (-;
the only reason they have not done it is that they dont want to steal AMD's thunder
if transmeta get their system working like a SOC and all you have to do is wire up the Phy of a net/USB/LCD/ideHD then I think they will really take off
vendors are sick to death with chipsets and chips they just want a nice x86 System On a Chip
regards
john jones
Why to an outsider this seems obvious
by
interstellar_donkey
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Let me predicate this by saying I have used or seen a Transmeta product. And in that, I think is the problem.
Going back a few years, I remember the buzz surrounding Transmeta. 'There is this company that's developing something ground-breaking... and Linus Torvolds is working there!' If memory serves me, investors--any investor would give their eye teeth to just be able to put money into something 'groundbreaking' being worked on by Torvolds.
Then we finally saw what it was. A chip. Oh. . . Well, what makes the chip so special? It uses less power. Oh. . . Does that change anything for us? Sure, your laptop batteries will last a little longer, and if you run a server your electric bills might be a little lower. Oh.
Of course, I'm not a programmer or do work on hardware, but for me this was a letdown after so much hype second only to learning 'It' was nothing more then scooter that was hard to tip over.
That was two years ago, and despite the fact that there is some benefit to the otherwise ho-hum technology, where is it? I buy a lot of computers, and I don't even know where to buy a Transmeta equipped machine (then again, I've never really looked, and have never been given a good reason to look).
So, again, this seems obvious. A company pours a big chunk of change into a product that never sees the light of day on a mainstream store shelf... a product that I quickly forget about and am only reminded from time to time on Slashdot stories.
I suppose, scanning the posts, that there are a handful of gee-wiz products out there (albeit not in the United States) with a Caruso chip, but I just don't see them, or see any reasoning to spend the extra money on them.
And so Transmeta starts laying off people. It just seems to be the next logical choice.
Re:Why to an outsider this seems obvious
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cgleba
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· Score: 2
One "gee whiz" product that uses the Transmeta processor and is in many local shopping-mall computer stores is the Sony Picturebook.
I think it is sold at CompUSA. Take a drive and check it out -- it is very neat.
Re:Talk to you all later.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I thought it was the giant evil dude from "Highlander".
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
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Augusto
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· Score: 2
> and has shifted its goals toward obtaining profitability in 2003.
Talk about short attention spans.
Of course I know the "shifted goal" is to obtain profitability(that's the whole point of the post). I'm questioning why that wasn't a main goal from the beginning.
Geez!
--
- sigs are for wimps.
You need to employ a mirror
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Funny
Transmeta just didn't give a big enough difference to matter. I'm on my Thinkpad T23 right now and it gives me over 4 hours of battery life doing normal work with no extra power management running. I don't spin the drives down, dim the screen, or any of that. All while using the wireless NIC built in. It would do even better if I used the power management options.
That's very good for most people since this is a "normal" notebook with a fast CPU (P3 1.13), plenty of RAM, big disk (48GB), nice screen (1400x1050), and a DVD/CD-RW.
I'm lucky to get 2.5 out of mine. Of course I'm using a pcmcia wireless card (did not go with the integrated wireless option)
Finkployd
Re:Too late...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That's b/c Intel cut a backroom deal to oust Crusoe from that very box. We had 7 1/2 hours of battery life (the "official" answer was that the TMTA box was canned b/c we couldn't hit our target of 8, but Intel "insured" that we didn't win by going and threatening "short supply of chipsets" to IBM.)
Re:Too late...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What does your P3 '1.13GHz' run at on battery power? Do you even know that it throttles back when it's not plugged into the mains?
One of Intel's responses to Transmeta was to stop publicising the fact that their mobile processors run slower on battery power (SpeedStep). They used to be marketed as, for example, PIII 700/300, meaning 700MHz when plugged in, 300Mhz when unplugged.
At some point Intel realized they were being a bit too honest and buried that information somewhere where people are less likely to find it.
I know mine uses SpeedStep...but ever see the benchmarks on a Transmeta? I'm sure mine is faster even clocked down than the Transmeta chip. If I was really crunching numbers hard I'd plug it in.
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
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fm6
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· Score: 2
Let's try again.
Our goal is to be profitable./Our goal is to be profitable in 2003.
I will eat lunch./I will eat lunch now.
I will die./I will die of old age.
I will pay you./I will pay you when I'm good and ready.
We will reform corporate accounting./We will reform corporate accounting when Hell freezes over.
Need more examples?
What crap
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Oh these Slashdot readers are so smart. When Transmeta first came out everyone lauded it like it was the second coming. Now they're failing and everyone says it wasn't that spectacular an idea.
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
by
Augusto
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· Score: 2
> Our goal is to be profitable./Our goal is to be profitable in 2003.
I don't need to quote "profitable in 2003", my point was that their goal should have been to be profitable from the start of the business or even earlier. You can disagree with that, but you're wasting your time "fixing" quotes.
--
- sigs are for wimps.
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
by
bugg
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· Score: 2
Their goal was to have a bottom line accouting profit in 2003. Many business, especially busines that require many resouces to be developed, only wish to not operate at a terrible loss as the business grows for the first few years of operation. Long-term profits are a goal for every company, but to suggest that short-term profits is a goal for every company neglects that companies must investment to expand and to couneract depreciation.
-- -bugg
SEC filings at www.sec.gov
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
http://www.sec.gov
Click under "Edgar", "company filings".
I predicted this 7 months ago
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I predicted that transmeta would fold within the year, as part of my 2002 new years forecast. At the time I was called a troll, I am now vindicated. Can I have my mod-points back now?
Re:I predicted this 7 months ago
by
evilpenguin
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· Score: 3
Laying people off is not folding. I'm hard pressed to think of any company that hasn't gone through at least one round of layoffs in its history. BTW, as an AC it is hard for us to know who you are and just where to find your "new years(sic) forecast."
Re:I predicted this 7 months ago
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Considering that all of your products are basically vapor-ware, I am surprised that you aren't laying off 90% of employees Transmeta! You hear that!? All except for Linus of course. Don't lay him off.
Happened to me in March - May. Small company, big project, bad management. Thing was we weren't alerted to the fact that payroll would be "late" (sometimes 2 weeks) until the very end of day payday. The last straw was finding out my family's health insurance, for which I paid $500/mo after taxes, had been canceled April 1. I found this out May 5, or so.
What a miserable experience. But we came out of it very well. My co-worker is working at a stable company for more pay (personal connection got the interview) and I'm working for my former client for much more pay, benefits, and equity (not options; equity in a profitable company). While I was sweating out the collapse of the old company I had very little hope going forward. Looking back, it was a great opportunity.
Intel just laid off thousands of workers, following a reduction in workforce by attrition of a few thousand others. It's an advantage if a firm can be flexible enough to lay off a good portion of its workers during a down time in the market for their products. Transmeta is selling to the same markets as AMD and Intel. Being able to adjust their labor costs more flexibly at in this period might be a demonstration of what in the longer term turns out to be an advantage.
And as long as Linus is there, all you suckers will line up to work for them again in a year or two when their market comes back and they rehire. You're not gonna stay away just because your or some friends of yours once got layed off, are ya? ___
-- "with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
by
nelsonal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It is important to be profitable, but few businesses are at the very beginning, because you have to make a product, and let people know about it, and build your factory before you get a sale. There are a few businesses that start out proftable, but they are usually quite small. I assume, they always planned to eventually be profitable, but setting a date like this means that they are willing to forgo the possibility of larger future profits for some profits in the near term. Usually its a sign that the capital invested in you is running out, and until you show the owners of capital that they have some chance of recovering their investment, they aren't giving you more.
-- Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
You don't know what you're talking about
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baxshep
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· Score: 1
You work for Wyoming.com?
Re:You don't know what you're talking about
by
baxshep
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· Score: 1
Sorry. "You don't know what you're talking about" was an older post I made on another subject. Don't know why it got in there. What I meant to say was Wyoming represents!
I would like to point out that if the workers owned the means of production, this wouldn't have happened.
But in a company like Transmeta - or indeed any high tech company whose value is its intellectual property - the workers do own the means of production. The company's product is the solidified thoughts of its professional staff. The staff own their own brains and their own educations and their own imaginations. If you've got those, what do you really need to be productive? A PC and a desk, and I bet most of them own those too. It's not like in old-style industries where the value of a business was in its physical assets.
Sadly, dot.communism doesn't protect you from the fundamental law of economics, which is that every participant in an viable economic system must produce at least as much as they consume. At the end of the day, TransMeta simply didn't sell anything that anyone else wanted to buy.
Re:F***
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Just a note, be careful with equity. Stock options are a waste of time too.
But with equity, you become part-owner of the business. Make sure you are not also becoming partly-liable for the business.
It won't be free-as-in-beer, though, because there are expenses involved, and you're still going to have to pay someone to transfer money.
HAH! I can't believe these yambags are still at it
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Call f*d company...More Linux hubris eating it hard. I love it.
Welcome to the Bush Economy
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
No matter how many times Bush says that it is improving, All I see is more sinking. But on the good side, As soon as I get out of debt (I was un-employed, now just underemployed), I will be busy saving rather than spending.
Re:Welcome to the Bush Economy
by
(outer-limits)
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· Score: 2
Didn't you listen to Bush about Kyoto, the American way of life is not up for negotiation. You have to keep spending, I am afraid, not saving. That is Un-American, and Un-patriotic.
--
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
Code Morphing
by
PhotoGuy
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Code morphing with only one target implemented (Intel), offers nothing above buying an actual Intel chip. And as mentioned, the power savings advantage is something others have jumped on very quickly, so there's little to differentiate it. (Although laptops using TransMeta still seem to have battery life ratings beyond the competition.)
Have they ever stated any intention to implement another target for the code morphing? Being able to have the same computer be a Mac or a PC (or a Sparc) would be far more compelling, and is what I had hoped the original story was all about. Is that just not lucrative? Do they not have the resources to pull it off? Was the TransMeta designed too much with Intel in mind, so that a PPC or Sparc emulation isn't possible???
It's biggest advantage seems to have gone completely by the wayside.
-- Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Re:Code Morphing
by
Ian+Bicking
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My impression when Crusoe was announced, was that the x86 instruction set was very important to them -- it's a much easier thing to emulate efficiently. A RISC instruction set (as in PowerPC) is much more difficult -- since now you're translating from RISC to RISC (since the internal instruction set is more-or-less RISC as well). You can decompose CISC instructions efficiently, but there's nothing to decompose with RISC -- the instructions are already simple.
The other potential seemed to be that they'd create different cores with different optimizations -- the first one, Crusoe, being power-efficient, another one could be optimized towards floating point, another to integer operations, etc. But that hasn't happened.
Alternate architectures would be interesting -- at least PPC. In a Mac, it could allow efficient Windows emulation... but that seems like less and less of an issue, as portable applications usually mean web-based, and non-web applications usually have Mac alternatives. At least, I don't think Apple is enthusiastic about Windows emulation, and without Apple PPC is useless, since they won't have MacOS. Other non-x86 architectures don't seem important -- there's little software available for ARM or SPARC that won't be ported to x86 if there's demand.
It's like with languages -- if you know English, learning a second language is no longer that important. Transmeta started out learning the English of the instruction sets -- x86 -- and there's little incentive to learning other languages. Even if some programs started out with different machine languages, they all learn to speak x86 eventually.
Re:Code Morphing
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
The "many computers in one box" approach fails every time, all the time, for everyone, because of three reasons:
The market is too small. Few people care about the difference between PPC/Sparc/x86. Less are willing to spend money on it.
CPU instruction set compatibility is only a (relatively) small part of the puzzle. You also need to emulate the peripheral hardware, buses, and interconnects.
Second best syndrome. Economic considerations force you to cut corners by finding a middle ground between all the architectures you are emulating. Thus you end up with a lowest common denominator architecture that neither performs well nor very reliably.
Re:Code Morphing
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Maybe they could branch out on merchandising!
"Get your Code Morphing Poer Ranger here!!!"
Multiple exclaimation marks. A sure sign of a diseased mind...
It would have been interesting to have a 4-way system running code-morphing chips that could target multiple CPUs and a meta-OS that would allow you to run multiple OSs (Mac OS, Windows, BSD, Sun, etc) on the same machine at the same time.
I'm not sure who would want one other than cross-platform developers, but it would have been interesting.
Great Sense of humour.
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
You obviously have not looked at monster/dice or you work for MS. In these parts, most of the MSCE are unemployed, and the rest were absolutly worthless
Do not count these guys out
by
John+Murdoch
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Hi All!
I think it would be a big mistake to count Transmeta out any time soon. I say that not because I'm a penguin-loving Linus-worshipper. To the contrary, I primarily use Microsoft development tools, and when I'm feeling giddy about Unix I use FreeBSD. The only Linux boxes around here belong to paying customers.
So why not write off Transmeta? Simply put, they're working their way into the product channel. Transmeta does have a very low-power chip--and that Transmeta technology is at the core of an emerging form of hardware: the smarter embedded system. Don't think "desktop replacement"--think "death to the PLC."
What's a PLC? Programmable Logic Controllers are tiny CPUs that appear in all sorts of specialty uses: controllers, valves, automated-just-about-anything. They're cheap, they're generally very reliable--and they have zero memory, have very limited functionality, and require programmers who demand significant coin. When you try to add a feature to an embedded application you will typically a response on the order of "that will take--at least--200 bytes of memory. And we only have 68 bytes left. So what feature do you want to drop to do this?"
Coming soon, to a factory floor near you... The Palm OS, WinCE, and the Transmeta chips are going to change all that. Handhelds and rugged semi-embedded handhelds are appearing in larger numbers--with gigabytes of flash storage, and 128 MB of RAM. Skip counting bytes--add all the features you want. Connectivity? They have 802.11 already embedded, along with USB, serial ports, etc., etc., etc. Some of the vendors I've browsed recently include InfoCater and SyntegraTech; they're both distributors for Tablets, WebPads, and handhelds that run with WinCE or Midori Linux. Very, very cool stuff.
Laying off 20% of your staff may be painful--but it is not the same thing as shutting the doors. For example, note that VA Software is still around....
Re:Do not count these guys out
by
AtomicBomb
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· Score: 3, Informative
Don't think "desktop replacement"--think "death to the PLC."......
Programmable Logic Controllers are tiny CPUs that appear in all sorts of specialty uses: controllers, valves, automated-just-about-anything.....
The Palm OS, WinCE, and the Transmeta chips are going to change all that....
I have very very strong doubt about this. Industrial automation people are in general very conservative (for some good reasons, sometimes). The reason that they tolerate PLC because PLC is rock-solid. In a lot of cases, the task PLC controls is really simple but critical (e.g. if the nuclear reactor is going to melt down, push all the goddamned controller rod right into it!!!).
Many chemical processing plants have modern looking control rooms with goodies like touch-screen big CRT a decade ago; they do not really care about money. In many cases, the SCADA system and the nice GUI frontend just reads data from the PLC... Once upon a time, I did some contract work for a beer brewery. During one of the presentations, I forgot to explicitly mention we won't touch their PLCs if we are going to install the proposed software sensor module in the first slide. I did see the technical manager's face changed colour and wanted to kick us out...
Re:Do not count these guys out
by
Cato+the+Elder
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· Score: 2
I don't think Transmeta is a PLC killer since embedded chips have been around for years. Look at the Motorola MPC8xx series--PCMCIA, ethernet, LCD controller, etc. all available integrated on a full 32 bit chip with decent power consumption. If they haven't knocked off PLCs, I doubt Transmeta will. On the other hand, I could see Transmeta chips making inroads in the embedded processor market--but it's not quite the same.
Honestly, the bullshit detectors starting going off the moment they lifted the veil of secrecy. It was a foregone conclusion a year ago.
The unemployment line...
by
Ars-Fartsica
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· Score: 2
...which is getting longer and longer in the Valley. Its getting scary. It doesn't matter how hotshit you are, there are ten guys ahead of you who will do an adequate job for 60% of your salary.
Added to which, these workers are inflexible. Most wouldn't think of doing something other than programming or hardware, which makes their job search even harder. Programmers will have to start looking at Barnes & Noble as an employment opportunity, not just a place to browse for tech books.
C doesn't deserve the bad rap
by
Ars-Fartsica
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· Score: 2
C was the right solution at the time - a simple language, which made tools development easier, and it offered solid performance.
Its still the only way to go for most performance-intensive applications, regardless of the ridiculous and false claims that competing languages have better average performance.
Re:C doesn't deserve the bad rap
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Its still the only way to go for most performance-intensive applications
Yeah right, cause no other language in the world can be turned into performance intensive applications.
You fucking moron.
Re:C doesn't deserve the bad rap
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They could reach profitability in an instant if they hired Arthur Andersen...
Still a Perfect Match for Apple?
by
EvilSuggestions
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Back when Apple switched the Mac from 68k to PPC, they did better than expected keeping the old 68k code going, but they did so by using slow, clunky software emulators. Imagine if they could have just had one chip than ran both instructions sets! Since Jobs has finally reached the point where he doesn't immediately shoot down the idea of switching to x86 (In a recent interview: "We like having options..."), maybe they should check into this as a way of keeping PPC going. It would solve many of their potential spin problems:
Not emulating PPC on x86. After hyping the superiority of PPC over x86 for so long, they'ld be insane to use an x86 based architecture to do the emulation that would absolutely need to support.
The "x86" Mac would not just be a pretty PC clone. Running MacOSx86 on Apple hardware would have a tangible advantage over running it on generic PC hardware: the ability to run all the current PPC based Mac software at reasonable speeds. Not a big deal for current x86-ers who just wanna dump Windows, but it would be crucial for their current customers.
On x86 hardware, but not Intel hardware. Given some historic biases, this might be a bigger deal than it should be. Suggesting AMD instead doesn't seem to help.
Lots of options for their appliance/"digital hub" ideas Imagine if they could use the same CPU in everything from a multi-cpu PowerMac Server down to a settop box or handheld?
Unfortunately, my curmudgeon side says this all makes too much sense to ever become reality.
-- "There is a thin line between ignorance and arrogance, and only I have managed to erase that line." - Dr. Science
Hiring Linus was the kiss of death
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
What did you expect from a company that hired a think-he's-god no good programmer that has set back the state of computing by 10 years re-implementing what's already in BSD?
That posting misspelled my last name, and used "linus@transmeta.com" which actually works as an incoming address, but is not my real email address.
The bulk of the posting is true, though - I'm still here, and my status hasn't changed. But I had to tell three friends that they were laid off today, so it was not exactly a good day.
What are you looking for and what are your qualifications? I got laid-off and was able to find a new job in a month's time back in April. I think a lot of it right now has to do with where your skills are. There's still demand, but it's much more specific than it was before. Hell before the skills required were having a pulse and knowing how to turn on a computer. The pulse was even optional sometimes:).
--
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Mismanagement, not anything carefree...
by
Futurepower(R)
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· Score: 0
It is a pathetic fact, but it is due to mismanagement at Redmond, not carefree lifestyle.
Linus got stock from Redhat
by
Futurepower(R)
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· Score: 1
Linus got stock from Redhat which was later worth $20,000,000. He doesn't need money.
Re:Linus got stock from Redhat
by
JimPooley
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· Score: 2
It may have been worth $20,000,000 at some time - the question is what is it worth NOW
--
"Information wants to be paid"
Re:Linus got stock from Redhat
by
nvainio
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· Score: 1
Then he bought a house and was poor again. (Reference: Just for Fun)
fuck the stockmarket
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
how come corporations play with the lives of so many people, just to satisfy a minority of lame stock-holders driving around in ferraris?
It's 40% not 20%
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Correction: 40%, not 20%, sir.
The moderator thought...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The moderator thought I was talking about Transmeta.
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Operating at a loss at ANY time in a business's growth is a failed business strategy. There is no time at all that that is acceptable for a corporation unless they are hurting. Transmeta's number one goal should have been profitability IMMEDIATELY even if it included selling licenses to their patents for code morphing to competitors to raise cash to pay back investors.
End of the line for embedded nirvana?
by
heroine
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· Score: 2
Guess it wasn't the nirvana they forecasted 5 years ago. Time to join Redhat's embedded operations, Lineo, and Embedded Linux Journal.
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Following your logic, no businesses would ever exist. It costs money to start a business, but you can't make profit before the business is started. That initial expense puts the business at a loss.
They targeted the wrong market
by
cybaz
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· Score: 0
Unfortunately for Transmeta, the market for ultraportable laptops never materialized. Consumers chose either PDA's, or mid-size laptops, and skipped the ultraportable laptops that Transmeta's chips were ideal for. They're not through yet, and I suppose they could refocus and try to target the PDA market, but the margins there are slim, and Intel is muscling in on the market w/ the XScale
This may not be the end of them, considering...
by
jonadab
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· Score: 1
Just within the last couple of months, I have started to see Transmeta-driven systems in catalogs (such as MicroWarehouse) for the first time. Or at least, *I* never noticed them before, and now, there they are, all over the place. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say Transmeta has finished development of its first product line and wants to see some profit before pushing hard toward the next product line.
Or something along those lines.
The other possible interpretation is that the Transmeta-based systems I was seeing in the catalogs weren't selling...
-- Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Bertie Bott's Every Architecture CPUs
by
Rupert
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· Score: 2
x86 is not vanilla. x86 is vomit flavoured.
C is not vanilla. C is more like the genome of the vanilla plant, that you could grow to produce beans (insert Java joke here) except you'd probably have a rogue pointer somewhere that would give the damn thing the blight.
--
-- E_NOSIG
So much for the death of Java
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So much for Linus' prediction that Transmeta's code morphing made Java irrelevant.
Chuck Moore, the guy that has designed the X18 and invented Forth to begin with, also designed the original version of Patriot Scientific's Ignite 1 cpu. They acquired the rights to Chuck's design and added extra things to it to make it a better Java processor. But at it's heart, it's a Forth chip.
I won't debate the virtues of having a small language with weak (heck, non-existent) type checking for systems programming. There are some bones to pick with C in terms of syntax and semantics, however, that could have been avoided from day one.
First, = vs. ==. It would have made more sense to use something like <- for assignment, or a keyword like "eq" for equality. Instead, we have the silly convention of writing "(SomeConstant == SomeVariable)" in conditions just in case we forget to hit the = key twice. (Very stupid mistake? Yeah, but I've done it, and I do know better.)
The C preprocessor. Probably no other piece of code has been more abused than/lib/cpp. Granted, macros are a cheap way to generate code, but the implementation is fraught with traps (try nesting macros and accidentally introducing a syntax error in one. Yum.). Not to mention what an unscrupulous developer can do with the "#undef" directive. Besides, using macros to define constants is silly (I use enum wherever I can for that reason).
Vague non-standardized data type sizes. Only chars have a defined size; everything else is up in the air. How many times have you been stung by using an "unsigned short" on another architecture, only to realize the size changed on you? (If you write kernel or driver code, it's probably happened to you.) And how many times have you had to deal with someone else's (e.g. your) implementation of types like "U16" or "unsigned32", just because the language forgot to include it?
And don't get me started on "long long". Grrr..
Don't get me wrong: if you view C as glorified assembler, it's a great language. But some cheesy semantics do allow for abuse, misuse, and neglect by the careless, and unnecessarily so.
So you've written off perl, Java, and the dozen other languages that use this idiom??
Vague non-standardized data type sizes. Only chars have a defined size; everything else is up in the air. How many times have you been stung by using an "unsigned short" on another architecture, only to realize the size changed on you?
Well how else would you suggest you have a SYSTEM programming language other than to allow native features to be exploited???
Re:Oh yes it does
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
> Only chars have a defined size
What is this supposed to mean ?
ANSI/ISO don't define the size of chars (beside the fact that sizeof char == 1, by definition)
1. go public
2. introduce a small change, nothing too big. don't give awy everything too soon
3. make like you just invented a new technology. well you really invented it when you started out but the consumer dosen't know this
4. monopolize
5. increase prices: ahem, due to market instabilities
6. announce sales and profit and reduce prices
7. retire rich but still run the company
Re:sig. (offtopic)
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
The 10 Commandments, Revised:... 4. Thou Shalt Not Kill (Except in the Name of Thy God)...
Not that I have a problem with Christians. But most of them walk around making exceptions for themselves so they don't have to follow their religion. If you're Christian, act like one, if not, call yourself something else, and don't give the rest of the Christians a bad name.
Which country has been invaded by the Christian church again?
OH--you mean the ones that America's invaded. No, go ahead and have problems with my country--just don't forget that little "seperation of church and state" law that keeps the two apart.:)
Linus Meets the Sensitive Recruitment Agent
by
fastdecade
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· Score: 1
1997
Linus:Hi, I hacked the Linux kernel together. Jobworthy recruiter: Sounds kewl, this'll help the IPO no end. Sign here.
2002
Linus: Hi, I'm seeking work in OS development. Jobworthy Recruiter: OS? No sir, I'm afraid we don't even have fully-developed OS jobs. We only have domestic jobs available. Linus: erm OS - I mean "Operating Systems". Jobworthy Recruiter: Oh right yes aha, some of our clients are using "Operating Systems". What Operating Systems do you know? XP, 95, 98, 2000, NT, whatcha got son? Linus:I'm more on the Unix side of things. Jobworthy Recruiter: Eunuchs? Ooooh Unix. You're a Unix bod huh? You Solaris, or maybe Sun then? Linus: I'm really Linux. Jobworthy Recruiter: Sure, you're Linus, I remember that. But I mean, what kind of "Unix" can you work on? Linus: Hmmm well most really? Jobworthy Recruiter:Sorry, I really need to know the technology you can do. Unixes are all very different you know. Linus:Actually there are two main varian- Sensitive Recruiter:Heard it before. No, they really won't take you on unless you done what they're using like say Solaris for example. Linus:OK OK I can do Solaris Sensitive Recruiter: Great. I think I got a VB job for Solaris, have you used VB before? Gotta be version 6.0...
Context is all. The more you have the better informed you are.
(Now, I am not saying MSFT would have been a good investment over the last two years -- It lost 20%. But Red Hat lost 80% in the same time, and the three-month rally at the end of last year -- which accounts for nearly the whole of RHAT's gain over the 12 months -- doesn't merit a mexican wave.)
This is a pretty strange page. It has links to the standard C# related resources, such as GotDotNet, MSDN and.Net SDK Download page, links to books and articles about C# etc.
But the "Hot Topics" basically take each feature that C# has over java and trash-talks it. The Delegates page finishes "C# Best Practice: Prefer Interfaces to Delegates". Properties "Discourage use of properties". Boxing & unboxing (being added to Java with Tiger, IIRC) "C# Best Practice: Do not use boxing or unboxing".
The site also contains no clues as to the identity of the person controlling it, which is suspicious.
I do not think that this website is an attempt at honest critique. I think someone is trying to get a high Google listing (by linking to.Net resources) in order to more effectively slag off C#.
-- NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
Morphing works, but lowering clock cycle works too
by
Kjella
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· Score: 2
Personally I'm running a laptop with a P3-750 (ULV) which uses about 10W at full speed, and 0,6W @ 175MHz. Add dynamic stepping and it'll vary between those two, but it's certainly not drawing more than a few watts for non-cpu-intensive work. The result is that screen, hard drive and all draws a lot more than the CPU. Even if I could drop CPU heat altogether, it wouldn't be that huge a sales point. This is a 1.1kg computer, and if it had had a huge battery like most laptops, it'd run way longer than I need. Even now, with WiFi running, downloads running to keep the hdd spinning, I'm looking at 1,5 hrs with the primary and 5-6 hours with both batteries. What it'd come to if I was just running Word, who knows...
[BRAG]in case someone was wondering, it's a Toshiba Protege 2000[/BRAG]
Kjella
-- Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Slashdot Mirror
... when he wore that shirt that said he would replace you with a small shell script!!
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Granted their code-morphing and use of VLIW had some interesting concepts, and their power consumption was perfect for laptops, but there just wasn't much of a market for what they developed. Had some of the bigger players (Dell, etc) actively pushed transmeta chips on the market, perhaps they might have made some money.
I for one am not sad this happen... they had some good ideas, but nothing insanely great.
br.
where will i get my slow chips from now?
transmeta faces a bleak future. intel and amd just keep one-upping each other on every new generation of chips. i don't think transmeta is viable to fill any niche in the market right now. let's face it, transmeta is dying.
In the computer world your either part of a monopoly or your being eaten by one. Wonder when IBM SUN and HP will start fighting?? :(
No word on whether there were any penguins seen leaving the building.
That was the punishment for not being profitable. Not only were the 200 employees fired, but they were forced to where penguin suites as they were escorted out.
has shifted its goals toward obtaining profitability in 2003
What were the initial goals??? And here I tought the goal of all businesses was to make money.
- sigs are for wimps.
I always thought that it was a strange business model to develop something pretty cool and then lock it up and sell it only to restricted developers. Surely they should have set the price based on demand and how many of the suckers they could actually make.
Oh well, another .bomb in the making
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
Here I sit in my cube. My employers were late on payroll for the entire month of June (June 15 and June 28 checks came on July 5). They are now late on the July 15 check. Two consecutive "this company is in the shitter" stories on Slashdot. Me with about fourteen resumes out in the wild and not a single reply. Shit. At least I live in a pretty place.
The middle mind speaks!
NAME: Linus Torvalds
ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Linux
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Still, having been laid off twice last year, I wish all the former Transmetites the best. I hope Linus is able to find an interesting job after Transmeta folds -- otherwise, my company could use a good code jockey...
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Just like they require less power, they also require fewer employees.
However, this isn't completely unexpected, at least by me. We bought up a lot of TM's products on Day One because of the low power consumption and high value-add. But around Day Four we noticed a lot of problems. Specifically we found problems with code path regneration, bit concordance, executing lagging on the backend busses and even voltage differentiation. That kind of low quality product eventually brings a company down.
It's too bad that Linux will get caught in the crossfire and most likely go into a tailspin, but that's the trouble when Open Source programmers go into the commercial tech sphere.
it would be sad, and something that would truly underscore the state of the economy...
How many people did Intel just lay off?
I think it was like 4,000.
A smaller percentage but still significant.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Why are all those articles so negative. Right now it looks like they overcame the production difficulties and are moving ahead with new costumers that are actually building notebooks with Crusoe CPUs. The U1 from Sony is the hihest selling notebook in Japan already and the Fujitsu P series is also selling well in the USA. With the upcoming HP tablet and the OQO, I would say they aren't doing so badly.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
before I get bashed by you guys, thats "Suits" not "suites".
:-)
but now I wonder what a penguin suite would look like.
Anyone know if he's still at Transmeta?
Click here or here.
"It's better to burn out than to fade away." -- Kurt Cobain FYI Neil Young said it first.
I wonder how long it'll be before IBM snaps Linus up. What better way to get support from the Linux masses than to snap up its creator?
- A
Do the folks from Transmeta try to find jobs with chip manufacturers like Intel, AMD, IBM, or Texas Instruments; or, do they look for software jobs? Who got canned; which division? I looked for more information, and couldn't find any.
Click here or here.
He told investors he would deliver a chip that ran at the same speed and used one-fourth the power of an Intel chip, but instead he delivered a chip that ran at half the speed and used half the power of Intel's. Certainly nothing to brag about.
People keep saying no support exists for the product but look at the hardware using the chips. Myself, can't wait to get my new Picturebook...
Sony, fujitsu, nec, hitachi, casio, toshiba, sharp, mico$oft, etc...
Product list
wanker
Thank goodness Linux has virtual consoles, so I could kill the process outside of the GUI... ;)
- Chad
$180mm of cash and near-cash, and $25mm of burn this quarter (+/- depending how you count), gives them a life expectancy of two years. I suspect we'll see a catalyst one way or the other before then though.
As for the 'penguins leaving the building', I might be able to give some good news (or not) to the guy. I'm still at Transmeta.
Like a lot (most?) of other companies in the business Transmeta has suffered. We've suffered just enough, IMO. We still exist and have a healthy profitable future. Crusoe processors are getting widespread, even outside the Japanese market where they were and still are king.
Essentially, some people from non-vital positions were the victim of a what happens in the general economy, and I feel for them. But the vital teams were untouched.
There will be no change whatsoever in my duties as kernel development maintainer of the odd series, I'll just keep on doing that as I've always have. No need to worry.
Did somebody read something that I didn't? I didn't see Linus mentioned anywhere in the article. Nor did I see anything specifically saying that Transmeta was going under. Yes, these are both posibilities, but not it seems that some of us are kinda jumping to conclusions.
.02 Euro as of this writing)
my $.02 (which is actually less than
mrdogi
Sorry for my previous posting being done anonymous, I didn't have my account ID handy, didn't use it for (quite) a while.
As for the 'penguins leaving the building', I might be able to give some good news (or not) to the guy. I'm still at Transmeta.
Like a lot (most?) of other companies in the business Transmeta has suffered. We've suffered just enough, IMO. We still exist and have a healthy profitable future. Crusoe processors are getting widespread, even outside the Japanese market where they were and still are king.
Essentially, some people from non-vital positions were the victim of a what happens in the general economy, and I feel for them. But the vital teams were untouched.
There will be no change whatsoever in my duties as kernel development maintainer of the odd series, I'll just keep on doing that as I've always have. No need to worry.
ive been looking around for the SEC filings. does anybody know where i can find them? i checked cnbc.com and datek.com (which uses cbs market watch) but they just have the 1st quarter results.
------
[insert funny
NAME: Anders Hejlsberg ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Turbo Pascal/Delphi The Empire found a spot for him and now we have to wade through C#. I dare not imagine what Linus Torvalds inflict on us if he went over to the Dark Side.
Can somebody tell me where I can get updates to the code morphing software? I remember reading that there would be code updates, but I haven't seen any and I have no clue whatsoever where to find them.
New YORK (CNN) - Intel Corp. Tuesday said it will eliminate roughly 4,000 jobs in the second half of the year after reporting a second-quarter profit that fell short of recently reduced estimates.
Executives of the world's largest chipmaker also provided a cautious outlook for the third quarter and the remainder of the year, as large corporations continue to curtail their information technology spending amid economic uncertainty.
Why didn't Slashdot report this news item, hhmmmmm?
The biggest insult is that at least when I pulled up the story (this may be a random advirtisment) but the ad that is almost as big as the story is for Gateways new line of laptops featureing, you guessed it the P4 from, you guessed it Intel.
Transmetta does not have to die. They need to focus on the two biggest problems in the computer industry: unreliability and low productivity. If they can come up with a solution that can bring at least an order of magnitude improvement in both productivity and reliability, they can kick both Intel's and Microsoft's asses.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we develop software and the way we design our CPUs to execute the software that we develop. There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. It has to do with the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software development.
We need a new software construction paradigm, one which is based on signals. Transmeta has the golden opportunity to do something real cool and save lives in the process. More can be found at the links below.
Project COSA
It may be more space-efficient to post stories about I.T. companies that *not* laying off.
And more useful to job seekers.
Table-ized A.I.
battery life and heat are interrelated, and have significant influence on the portability and speed of a laptop.
heat is what battery charge ends up as, so these are obviously directly related.
The portability of a laptop is largely influenced by its weight, and to a lesser degree, size. The battery is one of the heaviest and largest single components in a laptop (after the screen). So, a processor that draws significantly less power for a given level of performance allows the use of a significantly smaller and lighter battery pack, resulting in a more portable computer.
The performance of a laptop is, of course, by the performance of its processor. In a laptop heat dissipation and battery life conspire often force a practical limit on the processor. A more efficient processor, that demands less power, and therefore dissipates less heat, will allow a faster processor to be used in a given machine.
Oh, wait. This is a troll, isn't it. Oh well.
Intel has been profitable every single quarter, and has not layed anyone off. Intel stopped hiring, paid volinteers 6 months salery and gave them all their unvested options to quit, and paid people 3 months salery not to take jobs Intel offered them. Intel has no plans to lay anyone off.
I thought it was Def Leppard.
We will need the exact date and time you were hired and layed off, your supervisor's name and title, all your high school attendence records, your mothers maiden name.... can you actually do anything? No, sir we don't need to know that... but we will need a list of every class you took in college, your gpa, the length of your tongue, your race and gender, 5 references, notarize form B, sign here here and here ....
Why is this unique or surprising? Outside the empty politico rhetoric about a non-existant economic recovery, everything is sliding nicely down the toilet right now.
:/
Transmeta is letting 40% go. What about Intel? Intel is dumping 4000 of their own. Look around, the story repeats.
Things aren't pretty anywhere. That Transmeta is hurting isn't a surprise. Neither is it a surprise all of the "Duh, I never understood Transmeta/Transmeta had no real business plan" responses to this article here.
When did Pud take over as editor?
Transmeta's "code morphing" turned out to be another Really Neat Computer Architecture Idea that Doesn't Matter. It goes to the graveyard with stack machines, tagged-word machines, capability machines, dataflow machines, single-instruction multiple-datastream machines, hypercube machines, and Forth machines. Each of those has been made to work, built, and sold. Few people have ever seen any of then, but they all did exist as working commercial hardware at one time or another. None of them had enough of an advantage over vanilla architecture to survive.
The same thing will probably happen to Intel's Itanium, which, even within Intel, is considered a marginal idea.
In a way, it's sad. We're stuck with vanilla architecture like x86 and vanilla languages like C. There are many better approaches, but none better enough that the pain of conversion is worth it.
..wouldn't it be better for this so called linux "community" to hire linus on a shareware basis? You don't think that millions of linux users could come up with a few thou a month minimum just to keep him coding kernel stuff? why should he work for any one company, anyway, ain't he valuable enough? this is an opportunity for the "linux" community to put a few meqsly bucks where their bragging mouths are every month. I'm pretty po now, semi retired, mostly a small fixed income, but I think I can pony up 10 bucks for linus to keep him in beer and rent. I've spent 10 bucks on just a single shareware app before! And bill gates has profited off me, steve jobs, joe ibm, motorola, yada yada yada-they all have gotten their cut over the years. I run linux now, so linus should get some of the loot, it was his baby, yes? And redhat and cheapie bytes have gotten some of my loot, why shouldn't the main brain get some, too? And for that matter, why don't all the major for-sale distros shoot him a few bucks monthly as well? wazzup with the cheapskate-itis deal?
I think he should try it, a simple paypal or kagi or whatever "shareware" adopt a (major) kernel hacker effort.
Welcome to the world of accounting and making your bottom line look good in the short term. Never mind that it will take you over a year to truly recover. All companies do this kind of stuff.
...but this is ridiculous. Read the sentence again. The last two words change the entire meaning!
yes I think that they could have done or have done it
really this is software and the only thing that would limit them is some stupid restriction in the hardware (which they have not made) this means that the transmeta laptop now with a rom update is a 64bit machine (-;
the only reason they have not done it is that they dont want to steal AMD's thunder
if transmeta get their system working like a SOC and all you have to do is wire up the Phy of a net/USB/LCD/ideHD then I think they will really take off
vendors are sick to death with chipsets and chips they just want a nice x86 System On a Chip
regards
john jones
Let me predicate this by saying I have used or seen a Transmeta product. And in that, I think is the problem.
Going back a few years, I remember the buzz surrounding Transmeta. 'There is this company that's developing something ground-breaking... and Linus Torvolds is working there!' If memory serves me, investors--any investor would give their eye teeth to just be able to put money into something 'groundbreaking' being worked on by Torvolds.
Then we finally saw what it was. A chip. Oh. . . Well, what makes the chip so special? It uses less power. Oh. . . Does that change anything for us? Sure, your laptop batteries will last a little longer, and if you run a server your electric bills might be a little lower. Oh.
Of course, I'm not a programmer or do work on hardware, but for me this was a letdown after so much hype second only to learning 'It' was nothing more then scooter that was hard to tip over.
That was two years ago, and despite the fact that there is some benefit to the otherwise ho-hum technology, where is it? I buy a lot of computers, and I don't even know where to buy a Transmeta equipped machine (then again, I've never really looked, and have never been given a good reason to look).
So, again, this seems obvious. A company pours a big chunk of change into a product that never sees the light of day on a mainstream store shelf... a product that I quickly forget about and am only reminded from time to time on Slashdot stories.
I suppose, scanning the posts, that there are a handful of gee-wiz products out there (albeit not in the United States) with a Caruso chip, but I just don't see them, or see any reasoning to spend the extra money on them.
And so Transmeta starts laying off people. It just seems to be the next logical choice.
The Internet is generally stupid
I thought it was the giant evil dude from "Highlander".
> and has shifted its goals toward obtaining profitability in 2003.
Talk about short attention spans.
Of course I know the "shifted goal" is to obtain profitability(that's the whole point of the post). I'm questioning why that wasn't a main goal from the beginning.
Geez!
- sigs are for wimps.
No pun intended.
Still, having been laid off twice last year
Maybe it's not the companies you were at...
Transmeta just didn't give a big enough difference to matter. I'm on my Thinkpad T23 right now and it gives me over 4 hours of battery life doing normal work with no extra power management running. I don't spin the drives down, dim the screen, or any of that. All while using the wireless NIC built in. It would do even better if I used the power management options.
That's very good for most people since this is a "normal" notebook with a fast CPU (P3 1.13), plenty of RAM, big disk (48GB), nice screen (1400x1050), and a DVD/CD-RW.
Our goal is to be profitable./Our goal is to be profitable in 2003.
I will eat lunch./I will eat lunch now.
I will die./I will die of old age.
I will pay you./I will pay you when I'm good and ready.
We will reform corporate accounting./We will reform corporate accounting when Hell freezes over.
Need more examples?
Oh these Slashdot readers are so smart. When Transmeta first came out everyone lauded it like it was the second coming. Now they're failing and everyone says it wasn't that spectacular an idea.
> Our goal is to be profitable./Our goal is to be profitable in 2003.
I don't need to quote "profitable in 2003", my point was that their goal should have been to be profitable from the start of the business or even earlier. You can disagree with that, but you're wasting your time "fixing" quotes.
- sigs are for wimps.
Their goal was to have a bottom line accouting profit in 2003. Many business, especially busines that require many resouces to be developed, only wish to not operate at a terrible loss as the business grows for the first few years of operation. Long-term profits are a goal for every company, but to suggest that short-term profits is a goal for every company neglects that companies must investment to expand and to couneract depreciation.
-bugg
http://www.sec.gov
Click under "Edgar", "company filings".
I predicted that transmeta would fold within the year, as part of my 2002 new years forecast. At the time I was called a troll, I am now vindicated. Can I have my mod-points back now?
What a miserable experience. But we came out of it very well. My co-worker is working at a stable company for more pay (personal connection got the interview) and I'm working for my former client for much more pay, benefits, and equity (not options; equity in a profitable company). While I was sweating out the collapse of the old company I had very little hope going forward. Looking back, it was a great opportunity.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Intel just laid off thousands of workers, following a reduction in workforce by attrition of a few thousand others. It's an advantage if a firm can be flexible enough to lay off a good portion of its workers during a down time in the market for their products. Transmeta is selling to the same markets as AMD and Intel. Being able to adjust their labor costs more flexibly at in this period might be a demonstration of what in the longer term turns out to be an advantage.
And as long as Linus is there, all you suckers will line up to work for them again in a year or two when their market comes back and they rehire. You're not gonna stay away just because your or some friends of yours once got layed off, are ya?
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
It is important to be profitable, but few businesses are at the very beginning, because you have to make a product, and let people know about it, and build your factory before you get a sale. There are a few businesses that start out proftable, but they are usually quite small. I assume, they always planned to eventually be profitable, but setting a date like this means that they are willing to forgo the possibility of larger future profits for some profits in the near term. Usually its a sign that the capital invested in you is running out, and until you show the owners of capital that they have some chance of recovering their investment, they aren't giving you more.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
You work for Wyoming.com?
I would like to point out that if the workers owned the means of production, this wouldn't have happened.
[o]_O
Just a note, be careful with equity. Stock options are a waste of time too.
But with equity, you become part-owner of the business. Make sure you are not also becoming partly-liable for the business.
Equity is not all it is cracked up to be.
No word on whether there were any penguins seen leaving the building
I always thought Penguins were like cockroaches in that "Once they are in....they never leave."
Now if they could just survive a nuclear holocaust they would be all set.
The faggots on this site need to be butchered.
Some business *are* started with the explicit goal of losing money. Sometimes even losing a lot, in fact.
What someone in the free software community needs to do is come up with a community based alternative to paypal, without all the disadvantages....
Call f*d company...More Linux hubris eating it hard. I love it.
No matter how many times Bush says that it is improving, All I see is more sinking. But on the good side, As soon as I get out of debt (I was un-employed, now just underemployed), I will be busy saving rather than spending.
Code morphing with only one target implemented (Intel), offers nothing above buying an actual Intel chip. And as mentioned, the power savings advantage is something others have jumped on very quickly, so there's little to differentiate it. (Although laptops using TransMeta still seem to have battery life ratings beyond the competition.)
Have they ever stated any intention to implement another target for the code morphing? Being able to have the same computer be a Mac or a PC (or a Sparc) would be far more compelling, and is what I had hoped the original story was all about. Is that just not lucrative? Do they not have the resources to pull it off? Was the TransMeta designed too much with Intel in mind, so that a PPC or Sparc emulation isn't possible???
It's biggest advantage seems to have gone completely by the wayside.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
You obviously have not looked at monster/dice or you work for MS. In these parts, most of the MSCE are unemployed, and the rest were absolutly worthless
Hi All!
I think it would be a big mistake to count Transmeta out any time soon. I say that not because I'm a penguin-loving Linus-worshipper. To the contrary, I primarily use Microsoft development tools, and when I'm feeling giddy about Unix I use FreeBSD. The only Linux boxes around here belong to paying customers.
So why not write off Transmeta?
Simply put, they're working their way into the product channel. Transmeta does have a very low-power chip--and that Transmeta technology is at the core of an emerging form of hardware: the smarter embedded system. Don't think "desktop replacement"--think "death to the PLC."
What's a PLC?
Programmable Logic Controllers are tiny CPUs that appear in all sorts of specialty uses: controllers, valves, automated-just-about-anything. They're cheap, they're generally very reliable--and they have zero memory, have very limited functionality, and require programmers who demand significant coin. When you try to add a feature to an embedded application you will typically a response on the order of "that will take--at least--200 bytes of memory. And we only have 68 bytes left. So what feature do you want to drop to do this?"
Coming soon, to a factory floor near you...
The Palm OS, WinCE, and the Transmeta chips are going to change all that. Handhelds and rugged semi-embedded handhelds are appearing in larger numbers--with gigabytes of flash storage, and 128 MB of RAM. Skip counting bytes--add all the features you want. Connectivity? They have 802.11 already embedded, along with USB, serial ports, etc., etc., etc. Some of the vendors I've browsed recently include InfoCater and SyntegraTech; they're both distributors for Tablets, WebPads, and handhelds that run with WinCE or Midori Linux. Very, very cool stuff.
Laying off 20% of your staff may be painful--but it is not the same thing as shutting the doors. For example, note that VA Software is still around....
For changing the way we think about computers both in software with Linux and hardware with Transmeta
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Linus Thorvalds creator of Linux posts on Slashdot and gets marked down as a troll? What kind of moderation is this?
---
Honestly, the bullshit detectors starting going off the moment they lifted the veil of secrecy. It was a foregone conclusion a year ago.
Added to which, these workers are inflexible. Most wouldn't think of doing something other than programming or hardware, which makes their job search even harder. Programmers will have to start looking at Barnes & Noble as an employment opportunity, not just a place to browse for tech books.
Its still the only way to go for most performance-intensive applications, regardless of the ridiculous and false claims that competing languages have better average performance.
They could reach profitability in an instant if they hired Arthur Andersen...
Since Jobs has finally reached the point where he doesn't immediately shoot down the idea of switching to x86 (In a recent interview: "We like having options..."), maybe they should check into this as a way of keeping PPC going.
It would solve many of their potential spin problems:
Unfortunately, my curmudgeon side says this all makes too much sense to ever become reality.
"There is a thin line between ignorance and arrogance, and only I have managed to erase that line." - Dr. Science
What did you expect from a company that hired a think-he's-god no good programmer that has set back the state of computing by 10 years re-implementing what's already in BSD?
I just emailed Linus and he wrote:
Nope, not me.
That posting misspelled my last name, and used "linus@transmeta.com" which
actually works as an incoming address, but is not my real email address.
The bulk of the posting is true, though - I'm still here, and my status
hasn't changed. But I had to tell three friends that they were laid off
today, so it was not exactly a good day.
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I was wrong. sorry-next time I'll check my facts more thoroughly
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1) Hire Linus.
2) ???
3) Profit!
What are you looking for and what are your qualifications? I got laid-off and was able to find a new job in a month's time back in April. I think a lot of it right now has to do with where your skills are. There's still demand, but it's much more specific than it was before. Hell before the skills required were having a pulse and knowing how to turn on a computer. The pulse was even optional sometimes :).
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
It is a pathetic fact, but it is due to mismanagement at Redmond, not carefree lifestyle.
Linus got stock from Redhat which was later worth $20,000,000. He doesn't need money.
how come corporations play with the lives of so many people, just to satisfy a minority of lame stock-holders driving around in ferraris?
Correction: 40%, not 20%, sir.
The moderator thought I was talking about Transmeta.
Operating at a loss at ANY time in a business's growth is a failed business strategy. There is no time at all that that is acceptable for a corporation unless they are hurting. Transmeta's number one goal should have been profitability IMMEDIATELY even if it included selling licenses to their patents for code morphing to competitors to raise cash to pay back investors.
Guess it wasn't the nirvana they forecasted 5 years ago. Time to join Redhat's embedded operations, Lineo, and Embedded Linux Journal.
Following your logic, no businesses would ever exist. It costs money to start a business, but you can't make profit before the business is started. That initial expense puts the business at a loss.
Unfortunately for Transmeta, the market for ultraportable laptops never materialized. Consumers chose either PDA's, or mid-size laptops, and skipped the ultraportable laptops that Transmeta's chips were ideal for. They're not through yet, and I suppose they could refocus and try to target the PDA market, but the margins there are slim, and Intel is muscling in on the market w/ the XScale
Just within the last couple of months, I have started to see
Transmeta-driven systems in catalogs (such as MicroWarehouse)
for the first time. Or at least, *I* never noticed them
before, and now, there they are, all over the place. If I
had to venture a guess, I'd say Transmeta has finished
development of its first product line and wants to see some
profit before pushing hard toward the next product line.
Or something along those lines.
The other possible interpretation is that the Transmeta-based
systems I was seeing in the catalogs weren't selling...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
x86 is not vanilla. x86 is vomit flavoured.
C is not vanilla. C is more like the genome of the vanilla plant, that you could grow to produce beans (insert Java joke here) except you'd probably have a rogue pointer somewhere that would give the damn thing the blight.
--
E_NOSIG
So much for Linus' prediction that Transmeta's code morphing made Java irrelevant.
Look, we all misread things. Jumping through hoops like this to avoid admitting a mistake is childish.
Now that would be a neat trick!Chuck Moore, the guy that has designed the X18 and invented Forth to begin with, also designed the original version of Patriot Scientific's Ignite 1 cpu. They acquired the rights to Chuck's design and added extra things to it to make it a better Java processor. But at it's heart, it's a Forth chip.
I won't debate the virtues of having a small language with weak (heck, non-existent) type checking for systems programming. There are some bones to pick with C in terms of syntax and semantics, however, that could have been avoided from day one.
And don't get me started on "long long". Grrr..
Don't get me wrong: if you view C as glorified assembler, it's a great language. But some cheesy semantics do allow for abuse, misuse, and neglect by the careless, and unnecessarily so.
".sig,
1. go public
2. introduce a small change, nothing too big. don't give awy everything too soon
3. make like you just invented a new technology. well you really invented it when you started out but the consumer dosen't know this
4. monopolize
5. increase prices: ahem, due to market instabilities
6. announce sales and profit and reduce prices
7. retire rich but still run the company
YES, I'm a Christian. Got a problem with that?
;)
Not unless your invading my country. Again.
My cube. My friend. My solace. My prison.
Or else our uber-geekazoid father of all things good and true would surely post a little trollet in this thread? ;) //Miqlo (från Åbo)
Def Leppard is now playing Wal-Marts
1997
Linus:Hi, I hacked the Linux kernel together.
Jobworthy recruiter: Sounds kewl, this'll help the IPO no end. Sign here.
2002
Linus: Hi, I'm seeking work in OS development. ...
Jobworthy Recruiter: OS? No sir, I'm afraid we don't even have fully-developed OS jobs. We only have domestic jobs available.
Linus: erm OS - I mean "Operating Systems".
Jobworthy Recruiter: Oh right yes aha, some of our clients are using "Operating Systems". What Operating Systems do you know? XP, 95, 98, 2000, NT, whatcha got son?
Linus:I'm more on the Unix side of things.
Jobworthy Recruiter: Eunuchs? Ooooh Unix. You're a Unix bod huh? You Solaris, or maybe Sun then?
Linus: I'm really Linux.
Jobworthy Recruiter: Sure, you're Linus, I remember that. But I mean, what kind of "Unix" can you work on?
Linus: Hmmm well most really?
Jobworthy Recruiter:Sorry, I really need to know the technology you can do. Unixes are all very different you know.
Linus:Actually there are two main varian-
Sensitive Recruiter:Heard it before. No, they really won't take you on unless you done what they're using like say Solaris for example.
Linus:OK OK I can do Solaris
Sensitive Recruiter: Great. I think I got a VB job for Solaris, have you used VB before? Gotta be version 6.0
RHAT vs. MSFT....
It all depends where you pick your origin. So Red Hat did better over 12 months (rjamestaylor Sig).
12 Months: RHAT comes out ahead.
Take a look at this to compare:
6 Months: MSFT comes out ahead.
24 Months: MSFT comes out ahead.
Red Hat's whole trading history: MSFT comes out ahead. Big time.
Context is all. The more you have the better informed you are.
(Now, I am not saying MSFT would have been a good investment over the last two years -- It lost 20%. But Red Hat lost 80% in the same time, and the three-month rally at the end of last year -- which accounts for nearly the whole of RHAT's gain over the 12 months -- doesn't merit a mexican wave.)
NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
This is a pretty strange page. It has links to the standard C# related resources, such as GotDotNet, MSDN and .Net SDK Download page, links to books and articles about C# etc.
But the "Hot Topics" basically take each feature that C# has over java and trash-talks it. The Delegates page finishes "C# Best Practice: Prefer Interfaces to Delegates". Properties "Discourage use of properties". Boxing & unboxing (being added to Java with Tiger, IIRC) "C# Best Practice: Do not use boxing or unboxing".
The site also contains no clues as to the identity of the person controlling it, which is suspicious.
I do not think that this website is an attempt at honest critique. I think someone is trying to get a high Google listing (by linking to .Net resources) in order to more effectively slag off C#.
NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
Personally I'm running a laptop with a P3-750 (ULV) which uses about 10W at full speed, and 0,6W @ 175MHz. Add dynamic stepping and it'll vary between those two, but it's certainly not drawing more than a few watts for non-cpu-intensive work. The result is that screen, hard drive and all draws a lot more than the CPU. Even if I could drop CPU heat altogether, it wouldn't be that huge a sales point. This is a 1.1kg computer, and if it had had a huge battery like most laptops, it'd run way longer than I need. Even now, with WiFi running, downloads running to keep the hdd spinning, I'm looking at 1,5 hrs with the primary and 5-6 hours with both batteries. What it'd come to if I was just running Word, who knows...
[BRAG]in case someone was wondering, it's a Toshiba Protege 2000[/BRAG]
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings