Slashdot Mirror
Transmeta Up For Sale
arcticstoat writes "After giving up on the CPU manufacturing business in 2005, low-power CPU designer Transmeta has announced that it's up for sale. In a statement, the processor company that brought us the mobile Crusoe and Efficeon series of CPUs said that it has 'initiated a process to seek a potential sale of the Company.' The announcement came straight after Transmeta reached a legal agreement with Intel over Transmeta's intellectual property and patents, which includes Intel making a one-off payment of $91.5 million US to Transmeta before the end of this month, as well as annual payments of $20 million US every year from 2009 through 2013."
Seriously, it would be an interesting experiment, to auction it publicly.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Meaning, you pay me $50and I'll haul it away.
It seriously needs to be illegal for one corporation to buy another,and, when one goesunder, they just need to die,with all IP becoming public domain.
I hear congress is proposing paying SS benefits in Flooz.
Linus hasn't worked there in years.
Maybe I'll get some money for the 5 shares I have (after the 20:1 reverse split). I'm just glad I bought at $5, instead of people who bought close to $30/share (prior to the split).
There was a lawsuit by the main shareholders that sued the board. Seems the board thought it fine to pay the company council 10 million to settle the lawsuit with Intel. Something that only took 10 months to do. Million a month. Sounds fair to me. Must have worked at Lehman Brothers before this gig.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
As long as they don't mind if I pay them later. How's $19 million a year sound?
Actually he left Transmeta about 5 years ago to work for OSDL which is now the Linux Foundation.
which includes Intel making ..annual payments of $20 million US every year from 2009 through 2013."
I'll buy it for $18M between now and 2013.
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
It's somewhat ironic that Linus Torvalds worked for a company that is nothing but a patent troll today.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Hopelly, this transaction will be a mutual transformational transmutation...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
"You can own this Transmeta chair. Linus might have sat in it."
Engineering is the art of compromise.
How convenient!
If you are pissing away $700 billion, a company like Transmeta costs chump-change.
Why the hell not?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Shameless plug. For $10 million, I can transform Transmeta from a has-been into the number 1 processor company in the world for decades to come. There is a way to build a super fast processor core to handle parallel tasks using very little power. Unlike a GPU (which uses an SIMD configuration), this processor will be be based on a pure MIMD vector architecture. I also got an easy-to-use parallel programming model for it. Read my articles on Tilera's TILE64 to find out what I'm talking about.
Obviously a man who doesn't like the cut of your jib.
I have a Fujitsu P2000 with a Transmeta CPU in it and frankly the CPU is nothing special. It runs quite hot and doesn't have any significant power saving settings.
I love the P2000 because of the size, sturdy build, and dual batteries, but I wish I had been able to get the exact same laptop with an Intel CPU instead.
As far as I can remember there was never anything about Transmeta to get excited about. The only hype they ever had going for them was the fact that Linus Torvalds worked for them for a while.
... and this is in YRO why exactly?
If you want to sell a company at Auction, there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Seriously, how is selling a company at auction an interesting experiment? They've been doing it for hundreds of years.
They SHOULD have gone places. The owners should have ponied up money to small start-ups based around those chips. It would have been a small amount of money and would have gotten sales moving.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
First, Intel gives Transmeta the shaft by stealing the best ideas.
Second, Intel says, "I actually infringed your patents? I'm shocked you would make such an accusation!" Years later... Transmeta finally gets some money after being pounded into the ground by Intel and the law firm they paid to sue Intel.
Talk about some sad, frustrating working conditions. This would be one of them...
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I know Nvidia has made some statements saying they aren't looking at the uproc business, but they should seriously buy this company to put them on better footing to compete with Intel and AMD.
Here's to hoping Nvidia takes it.
One thing about the Transmeta buzz that I've never understood here on Slashdot is why almost no-one ever raise the ARM challenge that Transmeta faced. Transmeta wanted to be better than Intel at chips and better than ARM at low power design and their differentiation was....
Bugger all.
A massively over-hyped, post .com bubble company that had a better spin machine than a product line. Now can we all as engineers now formally apologise to ARM for thinking that Transmeta was worthy of being considered competition.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
this would be a good snap-up for AMD don't you think? The only bad thing about the transmeta I ran into a few years ago is that it wouldn't support VirtualPC (forgot the name prior to MS buyout - tried them both). This was on the compaq slate tablet pc.
To see them go. Their chips always looked interesting but I never got a chance to build a machine with one. Perhaps someone like Nvidia will snap them up? Although personally I'm betting if AMD starts to look like a threat Intel will snatch up Nvidia or Nvidia will snatch up Via. Because the CPU+GPU could turn out to be the right price/performance mix for the laptop/netop business. But if Nvidia wants to get into the integrated CPU+GPU game either the Transmeta Crusoe or the new Via ultra low power chips would probably go great with the new Nvidia Tegra chip. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Was highly innovative (i.e., use x86 as a "bytecode" and translate it on the fly into VLIW instructions). Many architects got excited about it, but (sadly) it didn't deliver. In the end, the "classic" out-of-order approach of PII/Opteron won.
In the end it all comes down to two things: a) overall performance + energy consumption. b) manufacturing yield. Even if you do a) right, you still need b). IMO Transmeta didn't have either.
The Raven
The 1G$ issue is getting people to use it.
x86 is "good enough", and the only way that AMD64 has gotten anywhere is... by providing hardware compatibility to x86. If you could provide a "TILE64" processor with a built-in x86 processor that is worth using, and have motherboards made for that, maybe it could get adopted.
Even Apple is using Intel.
Other processors are used in embedded/cell phones/consoles, but none are making a jump to general computing.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
It seriously needs to be illegal for one person to get another persons stuff. When one goes under, they need to die with all there stuff going up for grabs by the public... None of this inheritance stuff, just put everything up for auction on Ebay and send the proceeds to the government or charity. Also, what's up with this life insurance stuff, it's like betting you will die so you can get money for your beneficiaries... When people die, that should be it, there shouldn't be any reason that anyone but the public should profit from that...
I offer no money down, but the former owners get a share in all profits I make from it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This fabless company is slowly but surely making its way into the mobile processor business. It has got enough market cap, has a reputation in the chip business and is not encumbered with heavy acquisitions (yes, i'm referring to AMD). Low-power, efficient mobile chips is exactly what Qualcomm is after as well (see Snapdragon). Lastly, it's business model is also entirely based on patents which makes Transmeta a perfect fit.
Buying Transmeta would give Qualcomm the elbow room needed to jostle into the microprocessor business, and ward off hungry competitors like ST micro.
My sig has been answered.
A parking lot with open tailgates with property waiting for draft is open to question of a viable market similar to the closed nature of a modern swap-meet. The courts legislated of the states take use of a household hosted by a man of age, to pillage him with alleged duties and taxation no different than as an open market until that man reports those plundering him to U.S. Customs by a district Court of the United States with a Savings to Suitors clause and concerning an alleged trustee relationship concerning the income earned by those private corporations and individuals contracting him to those taxes through those legislated courts. All taxes regarding garnishments and seizures on land go through a district court, so they get around that by having the APPLICANT sign said CONTRACT to agree and assent to said taxable activity which is supposed to involuntarily be handled by the properly delegated district court, usually contained by a related corporated run as United States District Court. Have you courted that United States District Court concerning the verification of said tax?
Taxation determines a free market: tax is a physical or economical hindrance or impedance on non-lawful activities. If you sign a contract where you agree to a taxable event (with articles of association it is known as a crime in commerce) then obviously the terms of the contract takes you into the squalor of legislated courts (those places where they discuss a limited subject matter already determined that you appear generally as a taxpayer, as opposed to restrictive Appearance for not purpose other than defence). United States District Court holds a place where it is easier to resolve mis-representations aka a libel of review.
But you omit the reason.... We are stuck with x86 because the dominant platform runs on that. If we had an open source operating system that was popular enough, we could have applications in source form that would compile equally well on ARM, SPARC, MIPS, x86 or AMD64.... Heck, this is the case now for open source operating systems, and the ones causing problems like Flash are.... you guessed it developed for 32-bit Win32 systems.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
like Google, Yahoo, IBM, etc, because those Transmeta chips run fast and use as little electricity as possible. It is really needed to create green technology to use less energy and thus stop the coal pollution caused by the Intel, AMD, IBM etc cpus that use too much power and cause the coal burning power plants to burn more coal and thus waste our valuable resources.
Fossil fuels we need to conserve because they are finite and we need to do it as soon as possible to not only get prices down on fossil fuels but also ensure our future by reusing our use.
It does not matter if you believe in global warming, peak oil, or just want to stop using so much foreign oil and foreign fossil fuels and want to stop giving away $700B each year to foreign nations that hate the USA and use our fossil fuel money to fund terrorism and dictatorships that will one day do more wars and 9/11's on us using the money we pay them for fossil fuels today against us in the future. Both liberals and conservatives should be united on this issue and as a bonus it will help fix our economy as well. I'm a libertarian and I want to see everyone agree on this and help bring about greener tech for whatever their personal reasons may be. We need to work as a team on this and stop our infighting as we head into a recession and soon a depression and then when that happens money will be tight and we'll wish we didn't use too many fossil fuels as we'll really need them in the next few decades or so when they are scare or high in price due to shortages.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I omitted the reason because that is even harder to correct, and much harder to work around.
Trying to get every piece of software in an open-source format would be extremely hard to impossible. It would be nice, of course, but realistically isn't going to happen any time soon.
For example, Flash might have stuff licensed from other companies that Adobe can't open-source, so they have to keep it closed. And that is a simple application compared to some very big applications that businesses use.
Also, games are a big driving force behind x86. There are very few high quality games that are open source, unless they are 10+ years old.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The x86 is a dinosaur from the last century. It is about to go the way of the buggy whip and the vacuum tube. The same is true for all CPUs, IMO. The principles behind the CPU first surfaced 150 years ago when Babbage invented his analytical engine. It's time for something new. Vector processing is the way of the future.
Look, if you provide dev tools that make parallel programming so easy that a child can use them, then it will take no time for people to build awesome applications to go along with your massively parallel multicore processors. You would see amazing stuff come out of nowhere that is currently so cost-prohibitive as to be out of the question.
I know that, but I was talking about generic applications. Games, I don't care. Flash can most probably be implemented patent free.... And so on, the reason still stays the hegemony of x86.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Their buyer is gonna be either a Chinese company, Nvidia or Nokia.
If only one choice given, I'll pick the Chinese company. Transmeta, beside their spin machine, fits exactly the kind of goals the Chinese have these years regarding their own IT field.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
the PowerPC chip is probably the most widely used.. from printers and military boards to computers to Xbox/PS3/Wii to IBM 32/64 way POWER servers.
Perhaps ARM and MIPS have more units though as huge amounts of embedded devices use them.
If intel owns all their chip designs, what's left to buy? Does Transmeta have a 22nm fab laying underneath its quaint facade of slowish processors?
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
It's on Slashdot because Linus worked for them. IMHO, TMTA failed because they didn't make their product accessible to geeks like us. I've never heard Linus say anything about it; but it must have been frustrating to see VIA's mini-ITX boards selling in the $300-$500 range, while in the meantime the only way for the average Joe to access TMTA's chip was by purchasing a $1000+ "development system". Even that came only after a very long time. The management had a disruptive idea, but they kept trying to push it through channels. Big mistake. Disruptive ideas have to be put in the hands of people who want to be disruptive. The typical OEM simply wanted to pick the "I won't get fired..." processor, and TMTA's was not it.
Apple got started in the garage because they could buy processors in onesies and twosies at Fry's. That was never possible with TMTA's chips. So sad. If they had allowed geeks to write their own code-morphing firmware, there's not telling what we might have had.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The inventor of Linux made $200,000 there in a time of $1 gas and $200,000 houses. Transmeta was a star, like VA Research & Redhat. They were going to make something that they wouldn't talk about. Finally they revealed it was going to be a mobile CPU. Now who knows where Linus is & Transmeta is gone. At least the software was free.
Trying to get every piece of software in an open-source format would be extremely hard to impossible.
There is nothing preventing you distributing proprietary software as source code. In fact, it would have made a lot more sense if copyright only applied to software distributed with the source code. That would have made the book analogy a lot more compelling.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
And as they never produced anything worthwhile, good riddance to bad rubbish.
Not good for the US but it would make sense. China has been trying to make a decent cpu for a while. The transmeta chip designs would give them a boost over what they have.