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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.
Transmeta took the risk in having a very specialized chip--that is...it's very low power but not as fast as others
Actually, they took a different risk. They never thought the performance would suck as much as it does. They thought they could take a very wide core and implement software emulation such that it would be faster than pure hardware solutions by making the software "smarter".
They failed.
Which is really not surprising. It's exactly the same delusion that makes people still think that "compilers are so smart nowadays that they can easily create better assembly code that humans" when that is and always has been patently untrue. People always underestimate the complexity of optimization.
We will never have optimizers as good as humans until we solve the "great question" of human AI. They go hand in hand, but people just don't want to accept that.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Intel can afford to sell chips less expensively than it normally would in order to gain a foothold in a given market--and it has proven its willingness to engage in price wars.
...
This is the crux of the article, predatory pricing: airline seats, xboxs, OSs, etc. Sell the low-margin product at a loss to sell 5 high-grossing products for an AVERAGE price greater than your competitor. Even if the tablet PCs are a hit, they'll get squeezed when Intel wants that market share. So one foot in the grave at this point
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
I don't think performance sucks as much as Intel may want you to believe. Take a look at this for some benchmarks.
And you have to consider that all tablet with Pentium III will run at a lower speed when they are on battery.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***