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Where is Transmeta Heading?
Autoversicherung writes "Transmeta, once the darling of Silicon Valley, employer of Linus Torvalds and heralded as the new Intel is facing bleak times. Having $53.7 million in cash and short-term investments in its coffers, enough for just under two quarter's worth of operations and a reported net loss of $28.1 million and revenues of $11.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2004 the company's future is everything but certain. Will the planned restructuring to a pure IP company help?"
"Will the planned restructuring to a pure IP company help?"
No.
Isn't this how many technologies make it to the consumer? Company A invents it, goes broke trying to sell it, then the big players buy it cheap and finally the rest of us get to use it?
Oh, except for that famed 50+ mpg engine....
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That would mean that it would be in their best interests to support stupid laws like copyright-until-the-heat-death-of-the-universe laws and software patents.
Kind of a delicious irony there... employing Linus and striving to hamstring Linux...
Quote: Will the planned restructuring to a pure IP company help?
Does anybody else get the willies (shades of SCO) just hearing this? Okay, I admit it's a little knee-jerk but how many successful, in the contributes to society domain, strictly IP companies are there?
Sunny
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then bye-bye
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
employer of Linus Torvalds - so? Maybe Linus is a superstar but he is not a hardware engineer. How many other people, including hardware engineers does the company employ?
You can't handle the truth.
Transmeta must follow the example of another IP only company SCO and begin claiming ownership of everything and sueing everying in site before they run out of cash
"Will the planned restructuring to a pure IP company help?" . .
We do not need another Patent acruing company trying to screw with the tech econmy , Fair enough they jmay have good intentions now with this action but how long before "just this one" mentality takes over and they start sueing left right and center.
If they would like to become a research company working for others to develop tech , then fair enough but not an IP company
I admire the transmeta chips and would think it a great shame if the company goes under , but i don't want to see another patent group
I Hope they get bought out by a firm in the industry
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
...to TranSCOmeta.
Linus left Transmeta in mid-2003 and now works at the Open Source Development Labs. Here is ESR's unofficial Linux FAQ
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Sorry, this is the lamest attempt at getting me to post ever (The Tr**l word fucks me off)
The transition to an IP selling to others sounds like a bad idea for the company. I know several people who are chip designers and it seems there is a lot of competition in this area now. And the people I talk to do the design in house. Unless there is some great achievement no one is going to pay for IP to someone else when they can do it for themselves right now and have the staff and resources to do it.
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- Could run other OS's through emulation.
- Would give your notebook insane long battery life.
The first point never mattered in a Windows / Linux world that ran on i386 anyway. The second point never really came to be. I remember looking at Sony Picturebooks with dinky screens and Transmeta CPUs and seeing them last like 2 hours. Big deal. If they didn't double battery life, the public wouldn't notice enough to buy Transmeta on purpose. Then Centrino came out and, well, yeah, thanks for playing.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I wonder if it is time to re-write the patent laws, so the original inventor gets credit, but everyone else is not screwed. What is the law now, that a person with a patent gets to enjoy the benifits of that patent for life? Maybe the way to go would be to have patents be protected for 4 years, then fall in the public domain. It would certainly solve the problem of patents being sold, and a company hoarding them. Patents will encourage monopolies, when the essance of the paw is to break them up. If only company "A" can use process "X" to make product "Z", then unless someone else can think of a new process, only one company can make that product. This gets very dangerous when we think of medical products. Do we really want only one company making medicines for a specific disease because they patented a gene sequence?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
New European cars often go above 50 mpg.
Tranmeta processors: the best thing there WAS in notebooks, power-consumption wise.
But since consumers want a "Pentium 4" to play solitaire at the airport and look important doing fancy Powerpoint presentatons, that's all they bought...
how long until
To a bankruptcy hearing I imagine , or if not that to a court near you
That a 'good idea' is pretty much worthless against the 1000lb gorilla.
Welcome to bankrupcy, Transmeta.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
MY car gets 50 rods to the hogs head and thats the ways i likes it ...
Or on the other hand , If my calculations are correct in translating litres to gallons and miles to KM then my current car does about 55MPG
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
It would be amusing to see a few heads exploding around here as people see Linus working for a "pure-IP" company. Of course there's no real contradiction - Linus believes in IP.
I think a lot of slashdotters haven't faced up to the fact that IP makes the tech industry possible.
The problem with existing as a pure IP company that used to produce semiconductors... well, does it really work?
One of the first examples I thought of was MIPS Technologies. MIPS processors have seen widespread adoption, and exist everywhere. SGI bought the company in the late 80's/early 90's to keep the processors vital to their systems.
They existed for a while as a purely IP company -- they licensed the core designs to companies like Toshiba and NEC, who actually made the cores.
"Fully half of MIPS' income today comes from licensing their designs, while much of the rest comes from contract design work on cores that will then be produced by 3rd parties." (Wikipedia)
Now, MIPS Technologies was able to exist as an IP company for two reasons:
1. SiliconGraphics was pumping in cash to keep them floating and desigining processors for their systems
2. MIPS processors have become entrenched everywhere -- printers, routers, computers... it was (and is)one of the most widely used embedded processors.
Transmeta will exist without a large company backing them up. So that means you have to ask if they are as entrenched as MIPS. If they are, they stand a chance.
oh well, not a big deal.
Google makes that kind of conversion very easy. While rods are supported Google doesn't handle hogsheads.
the *only* reason why slashdot cared about transmeta was because linus was hired by them.. no other reason. the simple fact is that this company is a failure so could we please, please stop talking about it? it's going to go bankrupt like 99% of all startups, so it's really not that big of a deal. their technology really wasn't that great because intel smothered them with additional versions of their centrino chip. too bad so sad.
And so we say goodbye to our beloved company, Transmetta, that's gone to a place where I, too, hope one day to go: the toilet.
You can't handle the truth.
Yep, 50 mpg in liters per 100 kilometers = 5.7, which means many cars already make that here.
Hence the goal was actually to reach 3 liters, which was reached by a VW lupo (almost 80 mpg).
#include "coucou.h"
and thanks for all the jokes!
It made my day.
Gasoline or Diesel?
Diesel contains ~11,000 Wh/l, while gasoline only has ~9,700 Wh/l. So a 55 mpg diesel engine is only as energy efficient as a 49 mpg gasoline one.
Still, that's nothing to laugh at, but we need to compare apples to apples.
I dub thee... Sir Phobos, Knight of Mars, Beater of Ass.
that transmeta is reducing its workforce (mostly marketing people) and has a contract with Sony who will pay for the help of 100 of the about 200 people working for transmeta. This will reduce quarterly costs to 5 million and increase transmetas life expectancy. They also stated that they will help Sony to put longrun2 into Cell derivatives and also have Fujitsu and NEC as longrun2 customers. They stop producing Crusoe and 130nm Efficeons, but will continue to supply customers as long as demand and inventory permits. They plan on producing 90nm Efficeons for select customers(?? probably Fujitsu).
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Why is everybody so concerned with Transmeta suing every CPU user or manufacturer in sight? IP companies are not bad by definition. Just the contrary. And SCO is an exception! The first IP company I come up with, Rambus, is not the public enemy you are trying to turn those, who make a living out of intellectual property, into. Maybe not all of their products are as good or as cheap as many would like them to be (including Rambus themselves), but at least the company is not in the business with groundless lawsuits.
So please, stop bitching over insane snowflake_in_hell possibilities of Transmeta's future and ask yourselves what will you benefit if CPU manufacturers (ie Intel, AMD, IBM) adopt the very good technologies, part of Crusoe and Efficeon processors. (stuff like LongRun and LongRun2, you know)
petrol
--Fidelcatsro
fast reply :)
i own a compaq tablet 1000 running a transmeata cruso at 1 gig, while it does not run particularly fast, it works fine. if you replaces it with a p4 or even a pentium m, it would probobly melt the plastic. i kid you not.
If Transmeta treated java P-code equally as x86 machine code, or even PHP & Perl source code, what will happen?
Can an Oracle database performce very quick query on a Transmeta cPU?
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
"Code morphing" for the x86 instruction set never made too much sense, because making fast x86 machines is well understood, although painful. AMD already did some "code morphing" at cache load time; they inflate all the instructions to a constant length. (Intel does it differently.) For a CISC instruction set with inherent speed problems (the DEC VAX comes to mind) "code morphing" could be a big win. But there's no market for a fast VAX at this late date.
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it actualy comes to 4.7 (according to your link).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Transmeta is heading down the tubes. The entire IT industry is in the doldrums and will never see the light again. And we have not hit bottom yet.
Transmeta will go out just as Wang (remember them???) and many, many others did--in a flurry of lawsuits before final implosion.
Get out of the way! It's heading right for us! *ducks*
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
But things would be different if they did this 3 years ago, I hoped.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I'll give you a hint!
It starts with 'Chapter', and ends in 7 or 13.
I hate to say it, but Transmeta is about to become the Terry Schiavo of corporate America.
One of the major features of the corporation in America, as well as one of its biggest problems, is that the corporation receives the same rights under the law as a human being, although without the same responsibilities.
An IP company, especially one that no longer functions to research or develop new technologies, is a parasite on the corporate community, receiving what it needs to continue surviving (money) without contributing to the general good (new technologies). IP law becomes its feeding tube.
Pure IP company is tech industry jargon for "all washed up." Intellectual property is what companies do when they don't do anything "real".
I know, I know "Use the Preview Button!" :(
so brainwashed that all the 'progressive', 'liberal', and marxist thought patterns now permeate their beings.
before you mark me 'troll' consider IP as a new form of capital. those who control IP control the 'means of production' and hence control the 'workers'.
They do have a point though. IP is to present business consolidation as $ were to the robber barons. The same monopolistic practices follow and competition becomes impossible.
Someone really needs to point this out before we end up washing each others laundry for a living because any sort of innovation will be gobbled up or squashed by the IP companies. Folks will just quit working on new stuff and we'll enter a sort of technological dark age.
IMO the best way to fix this problem is loser pays tort reform. This way a small company with a case will be able to find quality legal representation to defend their IP. It will also be good for healthcare and social security reform as it gives all the displaced lawers some new targets.
is create a mega-geek-test-server machine which allows on-the-fly switching between different execution modes: x86, powerpc, Java bytecode, heck even MSIL. Just imagine what could've been accomplished like that: Testing a new video card programming scheme: no problem, write your emulator, load it up on your codemorpher, see how it runs. Writing a distributed native server, which has parts running on a powerpc, others on a x86? again no problem, buy 2 codemorphers, see how it runs, debug. Running a rack full of expensive (but resource eating) Java stuff? again, no problem, buy codemorphers and arrange them in racks - they consume so little power, that it should even be possible to run the stuff at home.
Well, as I look back at all that, most of the stuff woudn't make sense to a marketing dr^H^Hperson. Hm... Maybe it even doesn't make sense at all. Oh, well...
OK, point taken.
As I said Rambus was the first example that came to my mind and is definitely not the best (actually, just after I posted I thought of ARM). I admit, Rambus' business practices at times were far from unobtrusive. However, my idea was, that IP companies (including Rambus) are more often really creating intellectual products (i.e. technologies), than not. That is to say, I don't see why so many slashdoters expect almost impending doom (OK, I'm overexagearing here) beacuse of a chip developer/manufacturer going into R&D and licensing business.
In a nutshell, I'm saying that the restructuring of Transmeta should be expected to be more of a good thing than bad.
It seems that many companies are getting these MBA-dominated bright ideas about getting out of the manufacturing business ... they'll just license their creations and MAKE MONEY FAST!
This is much in line with the modern delusion that a company is at its highest efficiency and value when it only has a HQ with executives, lawyers and accountants.
Let's look at this a bit closer to the real work, shall we?
You're a chip manufacturer. You design and make chips. Then your company "matures" (actually, it goes insane with greed) and brings in execs from outside and directly from business school.
These idiot savants tend to belong to the Cult of Money and Style. They don't rise through the ranks of industrial processes, hence understand little about how real products are made for sustainable market share and profits.
So, these gee-wizards start to ditch the manufacturing side of your business. They do this since some spreadsheet showed them:
1. The Sales Department is wildly profitable, since it makes all the revenue and only costs some salaries and promotion.
2. The Manufacturing Department is wildly lossy, since it has no income and costs a lot of money for salaries, materials, equipment purchase and maintenance.
Unfortunately, these boy geniuses don't realize that chips are made in a broad partnership between the creators (designers) and the makers (engineers). You cannot long design something without running into a snafu in the manufacturing process, hence your design must change to reflect it. But (for some bizarre reason which suggests pervasive brain damage in most MBAs) the execs start thinking that they can only design chips and let some other sucker incur the "costs" of manufacturing. They start thinking that designers toss stuff over a wall to the engineers.
So we end up with a company like Transmeta. It is probably committing suicide, in the modern example of cutting off your own arm since you need to eat some more meat. That's OK, since competitors will then just move in and buy up the assets of Transmeta for pennies on the dollar (which is what they were really worth in a true sense).
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
You sheeple who fear change through risk will experience and witness violent evolutionary progress firsthand. The drivel comin from you bleeding edge slashdotters on this subject is pathetic. Banjias was the direct result of transmeta crusoe. 2.1ghz 2mb L2 533fsb dothan is in short supply. One of the most expensve CPU's on the planet - AND they cant make it fast enough.
I dunno, maybe the new Sony-Transmeta alliance may be worth something? YA THINK! Transmeta is out of the chip business - and they *never* should have changed their business model in the first place back in 99 or something to GO INTO THE CHIP MAKING BUSINESS. now its all back to the original business model - except the difference is Intel now has some little dothan now at 2.1-2.4 ghz. HA! Sony/IBM cell derivitave CPU will effectively kill all low power/ ULP x86 intel product. some say AMD already has done it - but we know better, dont we.
Face it: we dont EVEN know what we dont know. 8-way / 4-way ULP on a single die. game over.
Anything Linux, Linus, OSS zealots or "alternative" companies aside from Intel and Microsoft are doomed to die most painful, drawn out deaths. Personally, I can't wait until the steaming pile that is the Linux kernel goes the way of the dodo for good. It is shit and so are the zealots that back it. Here's to a Linux/Transmeta-free future!
Someone should set up a petition to lobby google to include hogsheads.
Wait a minute, isn't it /. cannon that IP protection is bad? I mean, no one really every invents anythign right? Pirate it, copy it ... it's not liek stealing.
Someone make sure Linus gets the memo.
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FYI, as reported Thursday by a news service at my office (tradethenews.com), Sony has signed a deal with Transmeta. The details of deal were not disclosed, however. Sony has had it's share of problems lately as well, so only time will tell if Transmeta will survive.
IP only companies are the only way to go. Manufacturing can be done more cheaply by the rest of the competition. There are many companies for which this model works well, Rambus to name one. Transmeta is too small to compete with Intel and AMD but they can makea nice living by licensing their product to Intel and AMD.
But to say that is due to IP is to pass subjective judgement.
Try to repeat this after IP is cancelled, see if the tech industry dies, or suddenly becomes innovative.
ARM completely owns this industry. Their IP is everywhere. They're in gameboys, they're in PDAs, they're in network applicances. Low power consumption, cheap price, great toolchains, and wide support.
The embedded tree is something like this:
PLD (22V10 devices)
Low power MCU (Atmel AVR, Microchip PIC)
Mid-range (8051; Upstart Rabbitcore; Motorola CPUS)
High range (ARM baby, Nat Semi's Geode is in here too)
From there you move into things like the motorola G4 architecture, via's C3, intels pentium M, etc.
Transmeta's advantages to risk are questionable, from this engineer's perspective, and yes, I actually HAVE used transmeta's hardware. It was too expensive relative to a Geode processor).
..don't panic
Having $53.7 million in cash
Wish I had that problem.
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the execs start thinking that they can only design chips and let some other sucker incur the "costs" of manufacturing
That strategy has worked well for NVIDIA.
Answer: Death.
I advise all shareholders to divest themselves of
Transmeta stock holdings.
For the majority of those still holding Transmeta stock,
this sell will mean a loss.
However, to hold Transmeta stock until delisting and
foreclosure, will mean an even bigger loss.
Toodles
It couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of guys. Transmeta were miserable to work with. They spent so much time worrying about their 'code morphing' IP that it never occurred to them they might want to sell chips, which might require being just a tad more open.
... the old "Core IP" excuse. One vendor had boards built and ready to go before they found out Transmeta wouldn't give them chipset info for the Efficeon (which they were using) but only for the older chips! This after Transmeta promised to provide the info.
I've talked to vendors who committed to the chips, only to find out they couldn't get docs
I remember trying to buy a development board. I had to get some kind of license # from transmeta before I could buy the board, and had to sign a click-wrap license stating that transmeta owned code morphing IP. I stopped right there.
Transmeta always had the option to open up "the architecture under the architecture" but would not take it -- would rather die, I guess, than take it.
Good riddance. It's a good object lesson for companies that try to hide details from their OEM customers.
Suppose Transmeta dies. Will it take its idea with it? Or will they leave source code and chip schematics for others to follow in their footsteps?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Okay you can mod this one down, but if you do, consider that the parent says OT in th subject. There's not really any reason to mod it off topic, seeing as how it's already marked as such - please use your mod points for something more useful.
According to this article at Computer World http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardwa re/story/0,10801,100808,00.html Transmeta is getting some new business from Sony to make derivatives of the new Cell processor.
smp
Sounds like poster above had a classic experience with corporate secrecy policy run amok. I had a strong impression that the company for the longest time was convinced that secrecy was necessary to survive (and an M&A experiance I had years ago gives credence) - too bad it harmed relationship which could have grown.
"Our goal is to preserve and monetize our intellectual property, using products, services and licensing as the delivery vehicle for that intellectual property," Swift said.
So - after huge losses over many years - the board has decided to try something (anything!!) which can recover a few bucks for the hapless investors. SCO was doing that too - just in a nasty way. I think TMTA is more likely to be on the side of the angels (I hope!!) - making arrangement for 100 folks to continue in a manner that puts bread on the table and derives value from all their hard work sounds good to me.
Now, I read a bit about "CELL" technology. It sounds like it has some pretty significant potential and just might gain some real traction because of the heavyweights involved (metaphor intended). Cheap - cool - scalable - code morphing - low power - cheap to run - this kind of mix might result in some really seriously amazing stuff over the next 5-6 years. You will really know it when your refrigerator tells you that you asked it to remind you if you were snacking too often. Yah, good thing.
If this means TMTA (humbled as it is) gets reborn and all that hard work does some good in the world, I'm for it.
Oh, and I hope Mr. Swift reads this...
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
So? Buying lottery tickets works well for the winners. Start looking at the process and population, and you can see what a fucking joke the lottery really is ... and the same thing applies to separating design from manufacturing. There are a few, random winners, but the process itself is unstable for the reasons I outlined, hence there are many losers. In the case of American outsourcing and offshoring, the sea change is so slow that it's taking a lot of time to see that companies are being flooded out of business instead of floating upward.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]