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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...
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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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.
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.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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.
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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.
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)
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.