AMD Invests $7.5M in Transmeta

trouserless writes with the news that AMD has invested heavily in Transmeta. The power-conscious chip company has been financially ailing of late. AMD is taking payment in stock, binding the two companies (both with suits pending against Intel) together. PC World reports: "Transmeta did secure a few licensing deals, notably in Japan, but it also wracked up heavy losses. In January 2005 the vendor announced job cuts and said it would switch its focus to licensing its power management technology to other companies. Later that year Transmeta agreed to sell its Crusoe chips to Hong Kong company Culturecom Technology Ltd. for $15 million in cash. Last year's deal with AMD, to resell Transmeta chips in Microsoft Corp.'s pay-by-installment PC initiative, raised the vendor's prospects again. But in March Transmeta said it faced delisting from the Nasdaq because its stock price fell below $1 for more than 30 consecutive days."

Comments

Makes sense...

[vigmeister]

Intel's overwhelming mobile computing dominance probably left AMD with no alternative but to buy their way back into competition. It would be interesting if they expanded their GPU/CPU thing to mobile processors sooner because of this. Anyway, this spices things up for the near future given that Transmeta processors branded as AMD will gain better acceptance in the market in general.

Cheers!

Re:Makes sense...

[jandrese]

They'll still be slow though. Transmeta had an interesting idea with the dynamic recompilation stuff, but it never really panned out. Their chips were light on power consumption, but they were dog slow the first couple of times you ran a program, and then they only crawled up to barely acceptable. Also, Intel did a decent enough job bringing the power consumption down low enough on their Mobile chips that people were in the end willing to accept the shorter battery life for performance.

Also, it was difficult to even buy a Transmeta equipped laptop because many manufacturers have exclusive licenses with Intel or AMD that prevented them from ever seriously considering Transmeta chips in their laptops. Worse, there is really no practical way for a person to home-build a laptop, and people who build desktops generally want performance over power consumption. The processor market is a tough game to get into. They should feel pretty good for surviving this long.

Re:Anyone remember blacked out building windows

[Otter]

Heh, they've fallen so far off the radar that Zonk doesn't realize there's a Transmeta topic!

AMD, the crappy Voltron

[Aqua OS X]

What's up with merging and investing in all these second tier companies? It's like AMD is trying to form some sort of crappy corporate Voltron.

Incorrect assertion

[Jacques Chester]

TFA says Transmeta shot to prominence due to Crusoe. This is wrong; Transmeta shot to prominence because it hired Linus Torvalds and refused to talk about what it was doing.

Ok now I know we're in bubble

[suv4x4]

Transmeta, the company with some quite amazing chip technology (do you know how it translates microcode on the software level to simplify hardware etc? pretty exciting stuff) was left in the position of a patent troll.

Investing 7.5 million in Transmetta is called "investing heavily".

YouTube, a company built on nothing (it's just a damn site for low res flash videos), that didn't make a dollar profit before google bought it, costed 1.8 billion.

A typical startup investment from a VC is around 3-10 million dollars and that's not "heavily" at all..

So with numbers that distorted, I know now: we're in a very fragile bubble right now, and when it burst, it'll be ugly. Uglier than before.

Re:Anyone remember blacked out building windows

[fm6]

I don't think Zonk's radar is much of a benchmark.

Re:peanuts

[GizmoToy]

It is practically nothing, but it's probably a good move on AMD's part. Intel's been basically running the show recently, and power consumption is becoming increasingly important. AMD will pick up some power-saving techniques that will help them compete with Intel down the road and will have paid very little for them.

Re:blog. $$$

[suv4x4]

I am a VC and would like to invest $50 million (FIFTY MILLION US DOLLARS) in your blog, please.

50 million?! Do I look like I'm desperate here. Try better next time.

Opteron redux

[ghoul]

The success of the Opteron came out of the DEC Alpha teams AMD hired away from Compaq. Now AMD is going to get the Transmeta innovations. Intel spends gobs of money on internal research to come up with new innovations. AMD being smaller cant spend the same so it is constantly on the prowl for talented researchers working at companies going down the drain and buys up the innovations at bargain basement prices and in this way manages to match Intel in the innovation game. Expect something as big as the Opteron was to come out in 2 years time.

Re:Opteron redux

[TheRaven64]

Intel got a load of Alpha designers too (and a load of PA-RISC architects, who went to work on Itanium). This situation is different. The Alpha was a great architecture, which was killed by management who bet on Itanium. The people leaving Digital/Compaq/HP were those responsible for a chip that had held the performance crown for about a decade. Transmeta doesn't have anything like the same amount of talent. They had some interesting ideas, but not one chip that could really compete in any area (even the low power usage was more hype than reality).

I for one...

[CautionaryX]

...am glad that AMD is investing money in Transmeta. Transmeta had some interesting concepts that if applied correctly (without the x86 emulation) would probably revolutionize processors where mobility and power savings count a lot more than all out performance like pocket PCs and really small laptops. I'd bet that it'll work even better on mobile graphics though. Dedicated video cards suck up battery life like a sponge, if the power consumption on those can be greatly reduced when not running visually intense programs... ah the possibilities.

And you thought I'd make one of those overlord comments.