Positive Reports From Transmeta

utopicillusion writes "The register reports : "More cash flowed into Transmeta in the second quarter than it spent, the company said late last week as a teaser for its upcoming results announcement." This is about after a month that CNN predicted that Transmeta was going under. "

Comments

I find this suprising

[X-Phile]

I'm not familiar with any new hardware that has Transmeta chips in them, and I don't remember hearing any big news about new partnerships. Where is the cash coming from? They promised a lot a long time ago, and they kind of stalled.

Re:I find this suprising

[morcheeba]

The Orion Multisystem (96 processors under your desk) and the OQO are recent examples. They are in some Sharp notebooks ... browse the list here.

Re:I find this suprising

[m4dm4n]

FTFA: "Transmeta has been aggressively attempting to cut costs ever since it decided earlier this year to get out of the chip manufacturing business and focus instead on processor technologies it can license to other vendors."

You're probably going to battle to find any chips with the name transmeta on next year. However, many other chips may contain licensed technologies in them that will be bringing revenue into transmeta.

Only a single quarter

[TheViciousOverWind]

I'd say it's a bit soon to come to the conclusion that the company is not going under, because of the result of 3 financial months.

I'm not saying that the company IS going under, but it's pretty easy for a company to shuffle expenses off to the next quarter and make it seem like the current quarter is greater than it in fact really is - If we were talking about a complete fiscal year it would be more impressive.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Slashdot's love for Transmeta borne purely from the fact that Linus Torvalds used to work for them? My understanding was that they had promised much in the way of low-power, cool-running processors for embedded applications, most of which have been surpassed by better offerings from other vendors. Why all the fuss?

Re:Question

[TheRaven64]

For those of us who don't care about Linus, Transmeta were still interesting. They developed a commercially-viable VLIW CPU, something Intel are still failing to do with Itanium. Some of us believe that VLIW is a particularly interesting concept in CPU design, in much the same way RISC is. Having the microcode in software, while not a new idea (the MicroVAX did it, for example) is also interesting.

Sadly, for all their interesting technology, they are still not producing CPUs that are all that useful - although the 96-CPU desktop using Transmeta chips does look fun...

Re:I'll Wait...

[10101001011]

I'm sorry, did I miss the memo?

Is the whole Netcraft thing done now, too tired, overused? I sincerely appologize. Allow me to rectify my error.

"In Soviet Russia, the profits Transmeta YOU!"

No? That one is also too overused? Okay, how about: "Yeah but do they run Linu.." Pardon? They do? Oh...

"Well I'd love to see a Beowolf cluster of these..." Now what? There are clusters of these. Damn, well...

"Cowboy Neal is hot!" I fail to see how this sentence relates to Transmeta's profits, but know that it was through modding my post a troll that you drove me to it!

IBM's new chips = Transmeta revival?

[bbzzdd]

The chips going into the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are similar in technology to what Transmeta was doing years back. They all strip out out of order execution, branch prediction, etc to reduce die size and circuit complexities. Maybe people are starting to realize the way around the Ghz wall is to reduce complexity?

Re:IBM's new chips = Transmeta revival?

[TheRaven64]

The PS3 / XBox 360 CPUs schedule instructions relatively poorly. This is not a problem for a console - it is a fixed platform and the CPU in it will be the same in a year's time. You can compile a game for the console with a compiler that's explicitly aware of the instruction timings of the deployment chip and it will work correctly on every console because they have the same CPU.

PCs and workstations are more varied. Every CPU revision can throw your instruction timings off and make your tightly compiled code suddenly much slower.

The only CPU I am aware of that is taking a similar approach to Transmeta's offerings is Itanium, which has a few quite neat tricks to get around the standard limitations of VLIW. Itanium bundles all instructions which can be executed in parallel together to allow additional execution units to be added later without and still used by existing code. Transmeta use x86 dynamically translate x86 instruction set code to VLIW code on the fly, so the compiler doesn't need to know about the native VLIW instruction set (not very useful, because it still means they need to do all of the things that VLIW is supposed to eliminate - although perhaps they can just do them once and then cache the results).

Oh, and no one is stripping out branch prediction. With current CPUs, the cost of a branch prediction miss is horrendous (it can be over 200 instructions on a P4, for example), so removing branch prediction would absolutely cripple performance. This is one of the reasons why languages such as Java have high-level syntactic constructs like exceptions - to allow the compiler to provide a hint for the first time past the branch (the exception path is known to be lower probability).

Re:Who cares?! Honestly!!

[jockm]

Face it this company is toast. NeXT even posted a profitable quater once too, and look where they are!

Yeah, all Tom Sawyer like, they got Apple to pay NeXT to take over Apple...

That's because they sold their processor business

[Nova Express]

I shouldn't be surprised by Slashdot's short institutional memory, but the rteason Transmeta showed a profit was that "it sold off most of its chipmaking business for $15 million to Culturecom Holdings." It's cash flow positive in the same way a family which auctions off all its belongings is cash-flow positive: temporarily.

Re:Who cares?! Honestly!!

[brokeninside]

I, for one, never cared about Transmeta because `Linus once worked there.' Transmeta was cool because (1) they were making chips using an innovative design, which is rare, and (2) they were making chips for a niche that I have an active interest in. Turns out that neither their VLIW design nor their approach at x86 emulation turned out to be efficient enough to be effective, but it is tremendously interesting technology.

You're barking up the wrong tree with your point about NeXT. The NeXT crew got purchased by Apple, engineered a takeover, and now control the single largest Unix vendor in the world. Are you suggesting Transmeta might do something similiar?

You're probably correct that ``unless someone wants their "technology" on a firesale this sucker is in game over territory'', but not for any of the reasons you listed. The real reason is simple economics. Transmeta, however an interesting display of technology, failed to deliver a product that is superior to its competition. Which is the sad part. We don't know if their approach is a technical dead end or if their particular implementation of it is a dead end.

You're also dead wrong that ``the market is only in it for FAST x86, nobody cares about power. And if they did they want to see it from intel, or AMD'' as demonstrated by Microsoft dumping x86 for PPC in the XBOX part II and Sony moving to the cell processor for Playstation part III. Not to mention that Via seems to be doing a brisk business with its low-power x86 and ARM doesn't appear to be hurting either.

In one market nich, the desktop PC, you're probably correct. But desktop PCs are a relatively small port of the market for CPUs. When's the last time anyone bought a cell phone or a PDA because of the `Intel Inside' sticker? Who cares whether or not their hardware firewall is running at the latest and greatest high speed Ghz?

Answer: No

[samjam]

No, it's not.

Slashdot's love for transmeta probably springs from the same reason that Linus went to work there:

it was a real cool concept

Along with many others, I was expecting to see a few more uses of code-morphing that x86 instruction execution, so I'm dissapointed there.

Other reasons are Transmeta are not Intel, and like AMD are doing cool stuff and cool prices instead of yesterdays (dull) snacks at yesterdays prices (I would say tomorrowws prices except that prices are going down) that we get from intel.

Sam