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?"

Comments

Linus left

[morcheeba]

Linus left Transmeta in mid-2003 and now works at the Open Source Development Labs. Here is ESR's unofficial Linux FAQ

Re:Willies

[Will Fisher]

ARM is a strictly IP company and is very successful. Its processors are used in many, many embedded applications. Eg, most cellphones, the gameboy DS, the iPod, hard disk microcontrollers, microcontrollers in cars, PDAs, etc etc. They recieved royalties for over 1 billion units last year. ARM cores are everywhere.

The difference is that ARM has always been an IP only company, ever since it was spun out of Acorn computers.

Re:Patent hoarding...

[nagora]

What is the law now, that a person with a patent gets to enjoy the benifits of that patent for life?

No, that's copyright. Patents vary slightly around the world but 20 years seems to be the norm.

Do we really want only one company making medicines for a specific disease because they patented a gene sequence?

No, which is indeed one of many reasons the USPO should be shot for allowing things it was never meant to allow, including discoveries instead of inventions.

TWW

Forgot to mention

[mocm]

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).

Re:Why do you hate IP compannies?

[servognome]

The first IP company I come up with, Rambus, is not the public enemy you are trying to turn those,
Rambus is a bad example, they tried to extort other RAM manufacturturers because they steered standards committees towards using technology they were patenting. As others have mentioned ARM is a good example. If you look at companies like nVidia, they are also very heavy on the IP side, as most of the work they do is designing GPU, the manufacturing is done by silicon foundaries.