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."

Comments

They should put it up on ebay

[j-pimp]

Seriously, it would be an interesting experiment, to auction it publicly.

Re:They should put it up on ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

re:
it would be an interesting experiment, to auction it publicly.
---

they did that years ago. it was an IPO. Made tons of money.

Sorry to see 'em go, but not entirely surprised.

Re:Don't worry Linus

[Puffy Director Pants]

Actually he left Transmeta about 5 years ago to work for OSDL which is now the Linux Foundation.

confused

[unityofsaints]

... and this is in YRO why exactly?

Since when is Ebay a stock exchange?

[JSBiff]

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.

Re:Since when is Ebay a stock exchange?

[alexmin]

Nothing wrong, except one you mentioned does not exist anymore, another is merged with Euronext and renamed itself and new market places popping up and taking double digit volume percentages. Three markets are thing of past long gone so your initial statement is very far from reality. But otherwise I agree, nothing is wrong with stock markets per se.

Their micro-architectural approach

[vlad_petric]

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.

Re:Did they ever have anything worthwhile?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Back before intel got serious about mobile devices, Transmeta looked a lot more promising. IRRC, Transmeta's first chips were available back in 2000 or 2001. The Pentium M was available starting in 2003. Before that time, the only things going in mobile x86 were the increasingly elderly mobile PIIIs, horribly energy hungry PIVs, or the not much better but somewhat cheaper Athlon XPs. All of those options were pretty uninspiring.

Transmeta looks boring in retrospect because Intel has been selling chips with an emphasis on power efficiency for a trifle over five years now, and(with atom and core) low power CPUs can even be had on the desktop, and in bargain basement configurations. Back then, that wasn't the case. Transmeta's fate was pretty much sealed when Intel decided that low power CPUs were a priority; but there was a decent chunk of time before that occurred, during which they were genuinely interesting.

Re:And ARM keeps rocking on

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Probably because Transmeta's big selling point was x86 compatibility. They never had a particularly credible chance at beating ARM, or MIPS for that matter, in markets where the x86 ISA didn't matter; but that wasn't really their objective.

Transmeta died when Intel went chasing low power design(2003), not when ARM went chasing the laptop/desktop segment(the mysterious future).