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."
Their final humilation
by
Jonny+Ringo
·
· 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.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
Re:no need to update his resume
by
Dr_LHA
·
· 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
·
· 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.
Re:Not surprising...
by
Coplan
·
· 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
·
· 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 )
Re:Goals of the company
by
Planesdragon
·
· 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.
How long have they got?
by
Anne_Nonymous
·
· 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.
Transmeta - the Power Management Company
by
Animats
·
· 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.
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.
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....
Slashdot Mirror
... when he wore that shirt that said he would replace you with a small shell script!!
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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.
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.
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.
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.
:-D )
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.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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.
$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.
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.
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....
They could reach profitability in an instant if they hired Arthur Andersen...
1) Hire Linus.
2) ???
3) Profit!
Because Linus doesn't work for Intel, silly.