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New Transmeta Chip: "Efficeon"
ddtstudio writes "Oh, "Astro" was such a friendly name -- but it probably had trademark issues. So the alphabet blender came up with "Efficeon" instead. This eWeek story gives the lowdown on what Transmeta is doing apres Linus. There's also a writeup on ExtremeTech."
Transmetta specializes in low power computing. That's their niche - processors that don't eat up much energy. This really isn't a direct-sale market. The stuff they make is built into other devices. So their job is to convience sony and/or palm or whoever makes the low power (read - portable) devices that they are the ones to talk to. So I don't think there's really a need to become well known outside the computing industry.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
$350 million buys a lot of presence in magazines etc... Similar problem for linux in trying to get past the reams of Microsoft bought advertorials etc. in the magazines as well...
Transmeta's Efficeon will have to compete on it's technical merits, and when people who matter realise that it offers a much better power consumption, lower temperatures and much longer battery life they'll start to take it up. 3 hours or so with Intel Celeron 1500 is just not on when I was used to some 24 hours or so battery life on my old 8086. Hopefully, the Efficeon will enable them to make notebooks that can cope with a complete working day or more away from the mains outlet... RAM's cheap enough these days to enable them to give it a seriously large cache so as to minimise HD usage, and sticking the OS in a bootable flash disk will improve matters as well. Now we just need a very low power display technology such as high res colour "electronic ink" based thin displays
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Transmetta specializes in low power computing. That's their niche - processors that don't eat up much energy. This really isn't a direct-sale market. The stuff they make is built into other devices. So their job is to convience sony and/or palm or whoever makes the low power (read - portable) devices that they are the ones to talk to. So I don't think there's really a need to become well known outside the computing industry.
True, but companies who make consumer devices would be more inclined to listen to Transmeta if consumers were demanding devices with Transmeta processors. The way to convice consumers is with direct marketing. If you were correct, Intel wouldn't need to targer consumers either, since most of Intel's sales are to OEM, not direct either.
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