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Transmeta Mulls Exit From Processor Market
chill writes "C-Net is reporting that CPU upstart Transmeta, once the employer of Linus Torvalds and maker of 'Code Morphing' processors, is contemplating leaving the chip manufacturing business. Already their IP licensing revenue exceeds that of their microprocessor sales, though both are dwarfed by their recurring quarterly losses."
And yet they're going to the CES in Lost Wages. (Booth 36235, LVCC)
[Hello! My name is ARTHUR SWIFT] "Hi, these are our microproceesor products, which cost more to make than we sell them for. We're thinking about breaking into the game console market next. Losing money seems to be working for the X Box!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They're doomed.
Best Slashdot Co
"...Transmeta is reporting a further reduction in power requirements by 44% and sees the laptop and sub-laptop markert as the primary markets for their new CPU. Intel and AMD claim to be catching up with the Transmeta chips in terms of power requirements..." Yup, that worked out well.
how about where everyone else get's them??
cyrix?
out of the 3000 mini-itx motherboards I have touched i have seen NONE with a transmeta processor. I saw cyrix, intel and AMD...
in fact I have NEVER seen a transmeta processor let alone anyone selling them.
Virtually every field nowadays seems to be ruthlessly dominated by one or two (if you're lucky, three) titanic competitors. Trying to break into an existing market is tantamount to financial suicide. Not because newcomers have bad ideas or make bad products-- but because the "mindshare" of the unwashed masses is so stuck on the existing titans..
.... well, Microsoft for operating systems.
McDonald's and Burger King for burgers.
Coke and Pepsi for cola.
Nike and Reebok for sneakers.
Microsoft and
Dell and HP/Compaq for x86 computers.
ATI and nVidia for graphics cards.
And... Intel and AMD for x86 CPUs...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
When I was researching building myself a little mini-itx box for playing dvd's and doing PVR I considered transmeta and via CPUs and boards.
The via sort of has reasonable support in linux, however the transmeta seems not to be very open about giving drivers etc away.
In the end I gave up and just used a long lead from the already present old server (Was doing firewall 7 routing etc) to the TV.
The idea of a cool & quiet little PC to do that was great, but unless you get prices less than an pc with a quieting kit and good support under linux (and windows) then it's not going to work.
To beat the incumbant you have to out perform and ouotprice it. Transmeta's problem is that AMD was already giving this a good go and people just don't want to use the unproven.
sure they lose a little on every sale, but they ought to be able to make up for it in volume.
Taking on Intel and AMD head-on is always an unlikely path to success. Still, the next big thing in processors has to come from somewhere, and if you can get enough funding to keep it running for 5 years it would be fun to try!
One key though: your first release would have to be tremendously successful right out of the gate, if not in sales at least in buzz. Transmeta's first releases were, well, who knows. So I guess they weren't successful.
Next move: sell to Intel for $50 million. Sorry investors! At least you gave Linus a place to work for a few years.
sPh
TM always avoided industry standard benchmarks. That is always a bad sign.
Instead, they always had some loser from marketing spout about efficency, blah, blah, efficency. I still have those emails and they are very funny.
While I worked at a major OEM developing blade servers, we evaluated their processors and the performance was very weak. De-clocking existing proven designs was a better alternative.
As is often the case with weak products, non-disclosure agreements precluded benchmark publication and disclosure of evaluation results.
RIP TM.
Quarterly losses? Whew! At least they arent sufferent from monthly losses. Or even weekly ones.
Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting
Tis' a shame that Transmeta had to get out of the chip making business. However, it appears that their presence was not in vain.
From the article: The company emerged in 2000 with a promise to bring energy-efficient processors to notebooks. The company's low-energy push spurred Intel to cut the energy consumption in its own chips.The company emerged in 2000 with a promise to bring energy-efficient processors to notebooks.
At least they had a long-lasting impact on Chipzilla. I never had to buy any Transmeta-powered products, but I know others who did. One tongue-in-cheek reason was to "root for the underdog."
The only hope now is that they don't get vilified for focusing more on the revenue-generating but much maligned IP territory.
I think one of the problems they had was that a CPU with low power requirements is only particularly useful in embedded (ie handheld) devices, and thus x86 compatibility is not that useful. The embedded market was/is already heavily controlled by ARM-based CPUs to begin with.
You neednt worry... VIA is taking care of most of those ;).
Check out www.mini-itx.com
BTW it's really a dissapointment that transmeta wasnt a success, but at least they tried!
The article summary is misleading. Transmeta already outsources manufacturing. I believe they've used both IBM and TSMC in the past--not sure who they're using at the moment. The article says that Transmeta is considering getting out of the chip design business and just license their IP. This is presumably patents, etc. around code morphing and other techniques that they've developed. It would presumably also represent a significant scaling back of the company.
Its a shame. I (heart) my transmeta based notebook, (i got it for £500 3 months ago) its so tiny. I may not be able to play back video very well, but its under a kilogram and incredibly small. Perfect for webbrowsing and email on the move :(
Who will make processors for these kind of notebooks now?
Eating a Wendys burger with a can of RC Cola, Wearing British Knighs Snearkers, Running OS X, on a Power PC Processor, but I have a nVidia graphics card... Damn! I guess I am just a Puppet of the Man!
Actually they are 3 Mega Corps but the #3 is usually far behind, but still close enough to get good Profit.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
.. they haven't even tried.
..
it seems to me that transmeta should get -serious- about what the real issue with sillicon-business is: getting the product *used*.
as a more-than-casual observer of the sillicon markets, but being consequently, admittedly, ignorant of transmeta's "consumer" stance, i can't help but feel that transmeta are still in the 'precocious spoiled brat', rather than 'serious competitive contender against golliath', stage of 'tech biz' development
obviously, what they needed to do was conqure small-run manufacturing, and get the 'last-gap' hardware issues solved, while fostering their development cults. they didn't do this, instead just forever 'being defeated in the Desktop war'.
we -need- more bold new CPU and silicon vendors, people. if only a handful of people in the world can print and manufacture silicon, that's sad..
if, after their cut-up, whatevers left of Transmetas' engineering team get enough of a reboot, maybe we'll see them focusing on chips for devices, rather than chips for general-purpose computing (in weird ways).
as a developer, if i could have 10,000 transmeta cpu's, all in good low-power/high-performance ratio, on 10,000 motherboards, with 10,000 power-supplies and invoices for 10,000 cases/assembly, i would write some bad-ass software, which would put those 10k cpu's to *use*. (i like to think i do this for a living..)
but i never got the sense that transmeta gave a rats about *actual* devices, preferring to over-general-purpose-ize their engineering efforts, so that everything was *expensive*.
(10k worth of 8051's, some batteries and leds==90's::10k ARM/PPC/TM-core ass'lies, some batteries, LCD, and a radio==2000's)
in sum: transmeta didn't think small enough.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I think the biggest reason why Transmeta can't compete in the x86 CPU market is the marketing success of Intel's Centrino mobile processing technology, with lower-power motherboard chipsets and the low-power Pentium-M CPU's.
Why bother with a company with a relatively short track record compared with Intel's long track record?
Transmeta came to the fore with a promise that sounded almost as dramatic as the Scientific Revolution. The problem with that is, you have to be right.
Too bad really, because it's just one more indicator that the era of significant investment in new technology is looping ever shorter. The day when a company would invest in Xerox machine development for 20 years like Halloid did is I think, gone. Now you have to show a tiny incremental improvement right away and the hell with quantum leaps.
And large oligopolies are in the best position to do that. Show minimal improvement with maximal crash and burn to upstarts. Didn't the Transmeta guys learn anything from Bill Gates??
All that development and hype, yet now they are getting out of the market. Seems they should have been well positioned to dominate in the handheld and portable market. Bad business practices? The EE Times also has a good article on this.
Having done so much with so little for so long, I now can do anything with nothing at all.
There just wasn't any demand for another slow low power x86 clone. The "code morphing" was nearly useless and failed to deliver what was originaly promised.
More a case of too much hype too little substance.
will be stranded ...
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Ayuh, Nike and Reebok have got the market cornered. Nobody gives a damn about the small, unknown, irrelevant players in the sneaker market.
"Code morphing" would have been more useful if the instruction set to be emulated was less well matched to a hardware implementation. The VAX instruction set comes to mind. That instruction set was hard to make run fast. Individual instructions had too many sequential steps. DEC struggled with that for years. But few need a fast VAX any more.
The only reason that Transmeta had any success at all was that they built a chip with good on-chip subsystem-level power management. That's something which Intel and AMD had previously not considered too important, having focused on desktops first and laptops second. But it's not hard to do, and Intel then started doing it.
I always wondered: with their "code morphing" technology, why didn't they turn it into a Java processor, with the ability to execute Java code natively? Yeah, I am aware of Sun's past efforts in this direction; but imagine if you will: Java apps running natively at the same time as Linux apps. Even if the processor is 3x slower than a x86, Java running natively would be comparable to Java running under VM on an x86 (please, I don't want to start a flamewar about Java's speed here).
Not disagreeing with you as branding is amazingly powerful, but there is more to it than that. Those big companies also have a lot of other advantages besides brand. They have among other things:
And a lot more. It's very difficult to attack a market leader directly. They simply have too many advantages (in addition to brand) to have a realistic chance of success.
I've always thought Transmeta's strategy was a bit questionable because they are attacking Intel/AMD on their strength. Sure, Transmeta's processors don't use much power but so what? The processor wasn't the biggest power drain in most devices that would use it. (the display screens usually chew up the most power) And Intel quickly released low(er) power versions of their existing processors which at least narrowed the gap. Plus a processor by itself is useless; it needs a board to plug it into and that creates an installed base problem. Dell doesn't want Transmeta processors because it increases production complexity and adds cost.
Transmeta's real product advantage (IMO) lay in their instruction morphing technology, not low power. It creates another abstraction layer making it easier for board manufacturers to customize products for companies like HP or IBM. This would allow firms that use several different platforms to potentially reduce costs by producing one processor and then tweaking the instruction set. Faster time to market and reduced cost. There are performance issues of course but I think these could have been managed if they didn't focus so heavily on the low power market.
Sad to say that, but Transmeta marketing is to blame. Face it, Transmeta could have had the market via now has with their C3 and Intel partially holds with their Pentium-M Centrino. The main problem was, that Transmeta went from day 1 to the manufacturers only, and were leaving the early adopters hardcore system builders out. Add to that an emerging home theatre pc market which Transmeta failed to cover that way (nobody bought at the early stages a HTPC from a manufacturer and most people still dont do due to DRM and other nastyness)
and a VIA which just said to the people, we are not fast, but they can handle the stuff you want to do with your HTPCs self made routers, firewalls, fileservers (you name it), we are cheap you can buy our stuff from the next vendor on the net and we will support you, and Transmeta was on a losing ground.
On one hand there was ARM which only sold cores and they did need less power, on the other hand there was VIA with the mentality you can buy our stuff even as a private person, and on the Notebook computer segment there were the Heavyweights Intel and AMD crushing Transmeta left and right.
So where did Transmeta stand there, basically nowhere because they refused people (and there were thousands who wanted to buy that stuff at an affordable price) the hardware, by selling only reference designs and not having others selling decent boards to an affordable price. Add to that that in Europa and other markets you basically could not get the stuff and that interested people were complaining in forums about that situation for years and you have a company doomed from day 1.
Now they want to concentrate on the core selling business, I wish them good luck they will need it, between a very good ARM on one side and VIA which still also sells boards to people if they need them on the other side and an Intel with a very good low to medium power solution on the server/notebook corner of things. Also IBM is in the business or at least other companies selling cores on the based PowerPC design.
Guess it is time to say to Transmeta, goodbye it was nice knowing you. (Hopefully not but there is a high chance)
Transmeta's code morphing was never exploited. They had several former SGI chip specialists, but made no real progress on the graphics front. They had Linus Torvalds on board, but didn't invest enough to make their initial Linux offering stable. Only a few manufacturers were allowed to sell Transmeta products - it was next to impossible to buy the CPU itself. And their QC failed badly on the initial Crusoe chip which had numerous bugs.
These weren't the fault of the engineers, or the design. These were political errors. Personally, I think Transmeta would do better to stay in the chip market and kick out their top managers. (Better still, sell the managers to SCO. May as well make some money out of it.)
Transmeta's main legacy, to date, has been to force Intel and AMD to cut back on their global warming efforts. Chips are much more efficient, especially on mobile products. Revolutionizing the attitudes in the top 2 manufacturers is no mean feat. I think people should damn well be impressed by that.
After the Crusoe was announced, IBM open-sourced their own code-morphing software (DAISY) but also did nothing with it. Another opportunity wasted.
So, yes, I'm not best-pleased with this decision, but it may have been doomed from the start by the attitudes involved. Sad, but familiar. (Also, not unusual in projects funded by Paul Allen. I only hope Rutan can shake off the curse.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Low level specs are great but I have a real 1Ghz transmeta chip on a sub 2 pound Sharp notebook (OK 2.5 with big battery). It lasts 9 hours like it says (tested on a long flight) and runs more than fast enough with XP for Powerpoint, Word and not bad even with a pig like CorelDraw. The power cord accidentally got unplugged while it was connected to the network once and it still had half the battery left after nearly a week on intermittent sleep
The price performance thing is pretty meaningless as long as it is fast enough to do what you need. Not everyone uses their laptop as a primary machine, or for video processing. My main need was something that didn't weigh like a lead brick and could let me do real work on a long flight or a meeting without having to plug in somewhere. The Sharp/Transmeta does that admirably.
As for the Centrino - it may be great - I don't know but I wouldn't go by spec-sheet alone (Xeons are the fastest chip right?). I'm curious if anyone here has *real world* experience with the Centrino based Sony? My understanding is that it has about half the battery life of the Sharp from the user reviews and I certainly don't discount that this might be because of different power management schemes that don't relate to the chip. But as a end-user consumer the Sharp notebook was a lot cheaper than the Sony last I checked and is far from being a sub-par product.