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Transmeta Needs Microsoft
An anonymous reader writes "Faced with dwindling sales, it looks like Transmeta
needs Microsoft's new tablet PC to survive." Or, if not Microsoft, some company who can spark the long-overdue tablet-computing revolution.
Are you sure these aren't acid tablets? Looking at how M$ Screwed Nvidia with the xbox revisions I don't see why Transemta would want to hop into bed with them.
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Why does everyone pretend they need MS?
If your business model needs MS, then you're already done.
Dance with the Devil and you'll get burned.
And if Transmeta makes the chips, then that is double cool.
I personally don't care WHO makes the damn things, as long as someone makes them, and gets them out there for reasonable prices!
Supply and demand....but where's the demand?
They're so far behing on mfg technology that they're screwed. AMD or Intel can take a .13 micron part, underclock it, under-volt it and spank em silly (while getting many more chips per wafer).
Fueling the frenzy was one of its lead software engineers, Linus Torvalds, who was already famous for developing the core of the Linux operating system
Linus was one of the lead software engineers for this company, and yet it needs Microsoft to keep it from flopping? Perhaps MS can do the hardware and Linus the software, which might actually make a good product.
What we need is linux open-sourceness with Microsoft marketing
That headline is a misnomer. Microsoft is not the only company producing operating system software that could run a tablet PC. Transmeta needs Microsoft? The article didn't say that-- it said Transmeta needs customers.
Transmeta should have realized a long time ago that they couldn't break into the laptop market (which is where they seem to have been trying to go). What Intel doesn't monopolize, AMD jumps on with greater resources than Transmeta could hope for (Hammer notwithstanding).
The MS Tablet PC could be the best thing to happen to Transmeta. MS isn't exactly happy with the major box brands offering *nix, and inside rumours say debate over whether security should be hardware or software have put a good dent in MS/Intel relations. By going Transmeta, MS can get a good price on a suitable processor (not megapowered like the portable P4's, but perfect for the job), which means more tablets running MS software, they get a bigger say in the design of the tablet, and the poke Intel in the ass and say "Don't push your luck, big guy, we don't need you as much as you want to believe."
And in the end, the result is just as good for open source on the tablet platform, because cheap tablets with a big company behind them will get a strong push into the marketplace, give OpenSource developers a reason to write for the tablet.
I say, Go Transmeta!
(hey, wasn't that a catchphrase from an 80's kids show?)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
I wonder if that has much to do with the US way of life - we see almost exact same trend in automobile and home appliance industries. People in the States like to drive muscle cars, SUVs, full sized cars, who guzzle gas like crazy. In Europe, the trend is reverse, smaller, more economic cars running on electricity or natural gas and well esablished. Here in the US, they all seem to be either developing very slow or even failing.
Same thing with the dryers and washers. Europe in Japan goes for making them more energy efficient and smaller (due to space constraints, mainly), where here in the US we dont see much of a move away from the full sized washers.
Because of that, I would think the quoted statement could very true.
...consumers are deciding they don't really need or want tablet PC's. Just a thought.
It hurts when I pee.
Would it be that hard to NOT use M$?
Yes, it would. They need a product that is going to sell hundreds of thousands of units, or even millions of units to make production worthwhile. There's no Linux based product that's even remotely close to that.
What exactly is the appeal of a tablet PC? What tasks are they better suited for than a laptop or PDA? Does someone know? This seems like a classic example of cart before the horse innovation. These may be cool gadgets, but if they don't solve a problem better than existing solutions, they will never take off.
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Some people seems to miss the point. Transmeta doesn't need Microsoft for it's OS or software, but for it's marketing powers. Microsoft and Bill Gates are in the process of creating a new buzzword; tablet-pc.
Transmeta is a relatively small, backbone company and cannot market its products properly this is why they need Microsoft, not because of their <flame>marvellous</flame> operating system. As a slightly on-topic sidenote it seems that though Microsoft used to be about making programs they've shifted towards being about marketing and should anyone ever put them out of the software business I guess they could start making commercials.
Look a monkey!
Tablet PCs are yet another ill-conceived product that Microsoft's "innovation" is foisting on the marketplace. Anyone who has ever owned or used a PDA will tell you that they are wonderful but for the lack of a keyboard. Some PDAs are even reverting to keyboards: see Zaurus and some Handspring and Palm models.
Tablet PCs are giant PDAs...or standard notebooks with a touchscreen but no attached keyboard. Either way, they are in a perfect middle ground of maximal uselessness. Yes, many will have a wireless keyboard that can be used, but what's the point? Get a notebook.
- Not making a small, widely available motherboard that hobbiests and integrators could just go out and buy. VIA came out with this and there's a whole small scene (mini-itx.com, et al) playing with it. This market could have been Transmetas, but they only recently put out a motherboard for developers that costs ~$600.
.13u production issues. This cost them *a lot* of momentum.
- Switching from IBM to TSMC before the latter worked out their
So with tablets we're getting a bulkier PDA (which is therefore not so handy for PDA uses), yet crippled in functionality when compared to a standard laptop, and certainly nowhere near as useful for all-around home and business use as a desktop computer.
Sure, tablets will be handy for vertical market uses. In fact, anyone who works in the shipping industry can tell you that these things have been around for years in more specialized roles. You could even argue that the Newton 2000 was a scaled-down tablet. Too big to be a good PDA, too small to offer much outside of vertical markets.
The PC industry is desperate for something, anything, that can drive sales. So they're dressing up an old notion and calling it "innovation". Think about it. Corporate IT departments won't buy them when they've already invested in laptops. Kids won't want them, because they want game power. Ma and Pa Kettle won't want them because they don't want to write emails in longhand. It's just not gonna fly as a mass-market product.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The number of humans that can outcode GCC is vanishingly small, and even smaller when you have to do keep track of all sorts of parallel dependencies and such. If I had to guess, I would say their problem is that they don't have the necessary capital to do the software development they would need to make this idea really fly. This seems like more of a research project than a business plan, maybe if they enlisted more support from the community by openning things up GPL style, it might have a chance.
If you are going to make chips, you should concentrate your investment on designing and making the chips, not the software. I'm sure they could do another design cycle in more modern fab technology and get much more speed (or lower power if that is the priority).
Also, my impression is that they aren't sharing a lot of board level IP either. There are lots of applications that are getting StrongArm and other low power processors that would be an ideal market for them, but these are all small companies without a lot of bucks to risk with new designs. OTOH, if you give them a basic design that uses your chips, and sell cheap prototyping parts and support gear, your going to get a lot more inquiries. Would this be enough to turn it around for them? I don't know, but would you bet your company on Billy G. deciding to endorse tablets? Even if they are successful, the danger is that Intel can swoop in and steal the market. You're much better off staying small and concentrating on the emerging niches. Specifically, the embedded market where Linux is already a good fit and doing well.
Too bad, though, it was a good idea, but the timing was bad. They still have some investment money that hasn't been spent, but it would be difficult to change direction now.
My wife did a course on Unix at UC-Berkeley. AOL, PC, MS Office were required for that course. This is the success story of AOL-Intel-MS which managed to sell themselves to a Unix student at UCB. Transmeta is just not big enough to sell themselves in a crowded market all by itself. Linux will not help them. They will need Microsoft support (who else can help them in x86 market). Most likely, even MS will not help them. They will exploit Transmeta to force Intel and AMD to come up with low-cost technology for tablet-pc that they won't to push through consumer's throat.
I dug up an interesting and related story about transmeta, that actually has quite a bit to do with the idea of the tablet PC being a niche market. You can read it on yahoo. Basically the cheap 2-cent summary is that they are looking to market the tablet PC to the third world, seeing as there is a high level of illiterate people there, and the tablet PC lends itself to a more visual and pictoral display since there is no keyboard by default. Similar to India's plan on the new pocket PC which will use a lot of pictures and voice to contribute ideas.
I think this is a nice wake up call for all the American's who take the ability to read for granted. A lot of people can't, why not bring them some tools that don't require literacy?
That being said, the idea that the "tablet revolution" is long overdue is complete BS. I haven't seen so much hype in at least five years when by now we were all suppose to be using thin client java terminals, and all content would use "push technology." Tablets are going to be great for specialized industrial applications but they are not going to replace laptops. People who think otherwise are the same people who think the Segway will be replacing the bicycle in five years.
I'd say if it was overdue then there is actually a need/desire for tablet PC's ??? I can't say as I've ever encountered it or someone who could point out a burning need that could not easily be fulfilled with the existing technology, ie a laptop or pda. It is the same problem that the PC market is seeing, why upgrade ?? beyond a couple of games, a 600 Mhz cpu does everything just fine. Until the new 'killer app' arrives and needs massive cpu power things are not going anywhere fast. CPU's far outpace the rest of the architecture now. While the geek factor might drive some sales, it certainly isn't going to make the industry retool at enormousn cost for VERY LIMITED BENEFIT.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
And efficient low voltage CPU means nothing if you monitor and HD eat a high share of your batteries. The agregate "power saving" of using a crusoe instead of a low die underclocked pentium is negligible.
If any other company could deliver a really low power display, and a really low power bus/memory then things would be completely different.
If a miracle happens and very low power displays and storage is achived, transmeta could make a real difference. The bad thing is that in this case, probably a low power pentium could also deliver what the consumer wants (ie: if you can have your tablet on for 2 days with pantium and 4 with a crusoe, both good be prety usefull. Who needs the 2 extra days).
They are doomed, they should focus on teaming with whoever is trying to lower power consumption of the other devices, and focus on the flexibility of the crusoe in the meantime.
unfinished: (adj.)
Someone pointed out that Intel or AMD could underclock one of their chips and beat Transmeta's offerings to dead. Well, why go that far? A simple 600MHz IBM PowerPC 750CX processor delivers as much battery time while being a far more powerful processor. Today. Granted, it won't run Windows but, hey, it would be able to power a TabletMac (Unix on a table, what a concept), say, something like a Powerbook Duo with 10.3. What the heck, I bet an iBook running Virtual PC with a good amount of RAM would beat the pants out of a Transmeta.
The truth here is that, unfortunately (?) Transmeta chips have _not_ delivered on their promise. Lots of hot air, but no goods delivered.
Mr. Torvalds would be better getting a job at IBM, Sun or, heh, even Apple.
is the interface. Face it. A pen is not the easiest interface to a computer. Adding a keyboard takes up too much room, and using a virtual on-screen keyboard uses up too much desktop space.
Until there is an effective, easy to use interface, tablet PC's will never be more than niche items. I've seen them put to good use in warehouses, and retail stores, but Symbol is already a giant when it comes to those markets.
Except for a few limited fields, tablet PC's are really not ideal. They are well suited to any field where you need some portability, and expect to be doing more data viewing than entry. The field that is most obviously well suited to this is the medical field. There you have X-rays, tests, etc, that can all be loaded from a central server and you only need to make small annotations. You need some portability, but not much.
The problem is that not many fields really fit that bill. You usually want either total portability or very limited portability (thus making the laptop or PDA a good choice). Furthermore you sacrifice a lot of your ability to do data entry on a tablet PC with only a limited gain in portability. A well designed PDA is actually far superior for data entry because I can use a thumb keyboard and enter data quickly. A tablet requires one hand to hold the thing, and then the other to do data entry.
I've used them and I've found that, for the most part, they are solving a problem that I've never had. I suspect that it's a problem very few people have, so except in a few niche fields tablets aren't going to be a big thing. So buhbye transmeta.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again. Tablets will only be successful in vertical markets. Sure, they may sell some at first because of the GeeWhiz factor, but writing on the screen is simply less efficient than typing. If Transmeta and/or Microsoft is/are pinning their futures on tablets, then a rough future it/they will have.
Hey there lovely lady, what's your name?
Transmeta.
I'm Bill.
And thus another tragic sad story ensues.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
Apple has the eye candy, but they don't have the basic research into voice, handwriting recognition and other UI topics that others (such as Microsoft) have spent millions on over the years.
Excuse me?!!? Is this a troll? Well, I guess I will bite. Despite Microsofts spending over the years, they STILL have not come to where Apple has been for years. I submit that I used voice recognition back in MacOS 8.1 including the ability for scripting of voice recognition. As far as handwriting recognition, I have a Newton 120 that had much better handwriting recognition than the latest Microsoft Tablet PC prototype that I played with two weeks ago. And I got the Newton 120 back in 1994!
You appear to be buying into Microsoft's marketing dis-information by allowing them to lead you to believe that all the money they spend on R&D makes them true innovators. Did you know that marketing $$'s come out of the Microsoft R&D budget?
Like it or not, if you look at innovation in the personal computing market, Apple has introduced most of the real advances. True they did not invent everything, but they were the first computer company with the balls to integrate many of these technologies. Lets go back to the CD-ROM. Apple was the first computer company to install CD-ROM drives in PC's and paid the price by getting sued by Apple records for their trouble. Do you remember installing big programs like Office before the CD? How about plug and play computing? You only have to look at the NUBUS protocol that eliminated all of the futzing about with DIP switches and such to get say a video card to work in your computer. How about Firewire? USB? The GUI? Drag and Drop software installation? Built in networking? Built in color for the video? Multiple monitor support? I could go on and on here, but I think you get the idea.
As a microsoft shareholder, I am not happy with the way they are doing their accounting and I believe that they are using a large amount of R&D expenditures as tax write offs rather than performing real R&D. Furthermore, this is a company with $40 billion in the bank and they STILL have yet to pay a dividend.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
What they needed then and need now is a comprehensive, grass-roots developer support program and to get humble quick about the power and performance.
It's a nifty freaking technology, and it was a LOT of fun to play with. Did you realize that the Crusoe during the launch party was the fastest native picojava bytecode processor in the world? Did you realize that had they exposed an interface to CMS (code morphing software), that someone out there could have written a PowerPC personality for it, allowing it to run both x86 and PPC apps at the same time? Can you imagine what else you could do with access to this incredibly powerful, real-time, back-end compiler? Did you realize that you could decode, issue and retire two integer ops and an MMX or fp op on every cycle, the same decode rate as a modern Athlon and a faster decode rate than the P4? Did you realize that all the tech is in place to allow you to download CMS upgrades that vastly improve performance? Did you know they have a perf monitoring tool that puts vtune to shame? Did you know that using gdb connected as a cross-debugger, you can hit "ctrl-C" in an NMI handler or anywhere else and get a complete dump of the internal processor state, including numerous perf statistics?
Tip of the iceburg for the current core, and their next generation architecture (TM8x00) is SO MUCH COOLER. Like hella-cool with chocolate sauce.
But you probably didn't know any of this because they don't think developers are their #1 customers. Someone there needs to watch Ballmer do his developer dance.
Crusoe's are cool. Transmeta was cool, too. Working there was like working down the hall from about a dozen John Carmacks. You could walk into any one of these offices and be blown away by what they were working on. They were crossing real-time translation and optimization bridges that Intel won't be getting to in years but will eventually have to face.
Microsoft learned long ago how important developers were. That should have been the main market to chase. Crusoe wasn't ready for the masses, not by a long shot. The performance is catching up with a vengeance with every new core, but they made so many promises and IPO'd on so much hype, that they entered the classic promise debt trap that so many dot-coms fell into, and their lofty marketing plan claiming that benchmarks are "wrong" (please!) and that it offers this brilliant power savings are just goofy.
Had they remained lean, not staffed up to 400+ people from the 150ish they had when I joined, and stayed quiet, humble, and in the service of developers until developers helped propel them to mass marketability, they would not be the laughing stock they are today.
Yes, they hoped to be faster than "native" x86 based computers by morphing to VLIW, but what they didn't realize was that there would be a terrible price in instruction bandwidth. They ended up with a lemon, made lemonade, then added red food coloring and called it wine.
If they exposed an API to CMS, I think they would be truly impressed by the tricks that independent developers could come up with to compress their own instruction stream to make the compression ratio competetive with x86 code footprint.
Do you realize that's really the main performance problem with Crusoe? The instruction bandwidth! On average, x86 instructions, because they're variable width and byte granularity, are 6X smaller than the average Crusoe instruction, which is made up of two or four 32-bit atoms in the current architecture.
OK, that's too darn bad, but it's the youngest surviving newcomer to the x86 market, and this is a solvable problem, and "with many eyeballs, all problems become shallow," once said a bright chap who ought to put his foot down and say it again.
Tablets: I made the demos that ran on tablets for their shows and IPO roadshow. They're cute, fun, no market for them yet, but again, something to get in the hands of developers so that they can make killer apps to create a market for tablets.