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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?"
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?
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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
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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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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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The problem is the chips are just too damn slow. Intel's chips in notebooks run hot and suck power fast, but they don't run hot enough or suck power fast enough to make people want to significantly decrease the performance of their notebooks for less heat and longer battery life.
Intel has put billions into R & D over the years to make their chips small and fast, and they are now starting to put money into making them more power efficient. Transmeta can't compete with that sort of hardware engineering with software alone. In addition, the idea of running multiple instruction sets on the same chip is not that big of a deal in an x86-dominated world. Transmeta had a good idea from a software engineering standpoint, but there's no market for that idea.
- 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.
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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."
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.
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.
Who says Transmeta had a good idea? They never delivered on any of their promises: long battery life, "code morphing", and all that. All they had was a slow, perhaps moderately efficient, processor that didn't offer any significant advantages over its competitors.
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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).
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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)
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.
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.]
Okay, maybe I was a little casual with my wording.
Transmeta did have a good idea, but they couldn't bring it to execution. The grandparent seemed to imply that this was somehow the fault of the 800lb gorillas (Intel and AMD) exerting their market dominance, but in reality it was just Transmeta not being able to deliver a desirable product that brought them where they are today.
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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