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AMD Invests $7.5M in Transmeta

Posted by Zonk on from the death-ray-for-peaceful-purposes dept.

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."

8 of 82 comments (clear)

  1. Makes sense... by vigmeister · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    --
    Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
    1. Re:Makes sense... by jandrese · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
  2. Re:Anyone remember blacked out building windows by Otter · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  3. AMD, the crappy Voltron by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    "Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
  4. Incorrect assertion by Jacques+Chester · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --

    Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.

  5. Ok now I know we're in bubble by suv4x4 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:blog. $$$ by suv4x4 · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  7. I for one... by CautionaryX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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.