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Transmeta Closing Up Shop
Ashutosh Lotlikar wrote to mention an article on the Business 2.0 site stating that chip producer Transmeta is going out of business. From the article: "The company's Crusoe family of microprocessors promised lower power consumption and heat generation, enabling the creation of laptops with longer battery life. Critics bashed the chips for being underpowered compared with Intel's latest and greatest. Transmeta struggled to find a market, and recently it sold off most of its chipmaking business for $15 million to Culturecom Holdings, a Hong Kong company better known for publishing comic books."
They're still working on putting out a chip based on LongRun2, which reduces transistor leakage. This is very important for cutting power consumption and increasing CPU speed. They've also licensed the technology to Fujitsu, NEC and Sony, none of which have released a product based on it yet.
It's quite possible, though apparently unlikely, that Transmeta will turn things around and manage to survive. However, Intel is already all over the leakage problem, so this may well be the end of Transmeta.
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I wonder what would have happened if Transmeta had released the instruction set for the native VLIW instruction-set processor that runs the x86 emulation layer. Sure, it's probably very hard to code for, but may have offered a tremendous advantage for some applications.
Also, hopefully OQO and others have a backup plan so this doesn't put a kink in the handheld pc market.
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If Transmeta does close shop, I hope they consider opening up their "Code Morphing Software". It's an interesting approach to X86 processing on non-X86 processors, for more info check here: http://www.transmeta.com/crusoe/codemorphing.html
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The Transmeta CPUs have the highest MIPS/Watt ratio of all, still. Laptops built around them have the longest battery life, and superclusters with Transmeta CPUs have some of the highest processing densities and lowest power consumption - characteristics that may not be an obvious advantage for customers in need of raw power, but that certainly lower the bill when you factor in the power needed to dissipate the extra heat, and the price of real-estate.
I will be the first to admit: I was sceptical when Transmeta started publicizing their ideas. I thought employing Linus was just clever PR. Yet, as time went on, I thought a Transmeta-based laptop would be a very desirable item. I hate it when laptops burn your lap, don't you?
Sigged!
Your empahsis this in order to convince people that this deal is bad?
I think quite the opposite, because I know Culturecom pretty well.
Culturecom Holdings, under which they've companies sells comics books, publishing press and magazine; they also manage properties, and they also have a technology company, which releases its own Linux distro (China 2k) for use in their line of Linux specific workstation and terminal server selling to China since 1998. Their distro originally released for office use and now porting to embedded system. Buying transmeta's production line is a sensible and wise choice for a proactive technology company devoted to Linux business like Culturecom.
I don't know others, but I feel good to hear that a company devoted to Linux business since boom still around and kicking and decided to enhance their Linux business.
Disclamer: I worked for Culturecom even before they started their Linux business.