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."
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.
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. . .
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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
by
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
by
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.
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
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.
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.
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%.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Re:Intel Fires 4000 Employees 2002-07-16
by
buffy
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· Score: 5, Insightful
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.
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.
yeah, but you're missing a chance to hang out at memorial terrace during your long lunches
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.
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.
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
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
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
·
· 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
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
by
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
by
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
sigwinch
·
· 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
·
· 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.
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
by
cgleba
·
· 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:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
by
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.
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 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..
by
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?
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
by
Augusto
·
· 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.
Uh, the real linus does read slashdot. He does make posts on occassion and has had at least one slashdot interview that I can remember.
Anybody who is anyone reads slashdot!
I can hear the whispers of the word "slashdot", from a thousand geeks, roll across the plains.
This cylix fellow, I'm amazed he reads slashdot... he is way to famous!
-- "You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Re:I realize attention spans are getting shorter..
by
bugg
·
· 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.
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
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
·
· 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.
Re:I predicted this 7 months ago
by
evilpenguin
·
· 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."
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.
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.
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.
What someone in the free software community needs to do is come up with a community based alternative to paypal, without all the disadvantages....
Code Morphing
by
PhotoGuy
·
· 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
·
· 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.
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.
Do not count these guys out
by
John+Murdoch
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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
·
· 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.
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
How Transmeta can turn a profit.
by
Fastball
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· Score: 4, Funny
1) Hire Linus. 2) ??? 3) Profit!
Re:Welcome to the Bush Economy
by
(outer-limits)
·
· 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?
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?
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?
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.
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.
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???
Morphing works, but lowering clock cycle works too
by
Kjella
·
· 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.
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
they just built some big education building accross the street from my work "national university" or something retarded like that.
so even the nation semi tech's might start turning out decent chips soon... THEN where will you get them?!
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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.
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?
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.
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***
Yes, but I live in the middle of nowhere. The closest thing to me that resembles a city is Laramie, Wymoing. Heh.
I just keep telling myself, now is not the time to panic.
The middle mind speaks!
Click here or here.
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.
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.
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.
Finding God in a Dog
$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.
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.
yeah, but you're missing a chance to hang out at memorial terrace during your long lunches
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.
Somehow I doubt the Real Linus(TM) reads Slashdot.
The Free desktop that Just Works
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.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
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.
...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
> 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.
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?
> 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.
Uh, the real linus does read slashdot. He does make posts on occassion and has had at least one slashdot interview that I can remember.
Anybody who is anyone reads slashdot!
I can hear the whispers of the word "slashdot", from a thousand geeks, roll across the plains.
This cylix fellow, I'm amazed he reads slashdot... he is way to famous!
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
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
Edgar Online is the defacto source for this kind of stuff. Here's the link.
Josh Woodward
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
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
How about Yahoo ? They are using Edgar online that the other poster mentioned.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
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."
I would like to point out that if the workers owned the means of production, this wouldn't have happened.
[o]_O
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.
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.
What someone in the free software community needs to do is come up with a community based alternative to paypal, without all the disadvantages....
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.
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....
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
1) Hire Linus.
2) ???
3) Profit!
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?
Delphi is an excellent product. So what are C# failings, apart from the learning curve of a new language?
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
It may have been worth $20,000,000 at some time - the question is what is it worth NOW
"Information wants to be paid"
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"
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?
Guess it wasn't the nirvana they forecasted 5 years ago. Time to join Redhat's embedded operations, Lineo, and Embedded Linux Journal.
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
Look, we all misread things. Jumping through hoops like this to avoid admitting a mistake is childish.
Now that would be a neat trick!Nah, it was on the west side in some crappy bid'ness park. The best I could have hoped for was the Culvers on the beltline.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
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,
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