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."
Industry Wide
by
stoolpigeon
·
· 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?
MOD PARENT DOWN - troll link w/Javascript popups
by
Chad+Page
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Thank goodness Linux has virtual consoles, so I could kill the process outside of the GUI...;)
- Chad
portability, performance & battery life are li
by
Gumber
·
· 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.
Re:Ditzel should be behind bars
by
nelsonal
·
· 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.
Re:Do not count these guys out
by
AtomicBomb
·
· 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:Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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:Goals of the company
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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.
Slashdot Mirror
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?
Thank goodness Linux has virtual consoles, so I could kill the process outside of the GUI... ;)
- Chad
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.
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.
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...
VLIW is a great idea for certain application domains..
like DSP, some multimedia stuff etc. and has been
very succesful in these domains.
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.