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.
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.
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.
It may well be that the fate of all companies is either success or patent trolling. A company in a death spiral pretty much will become a patent troll. Sad.
"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!
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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"?
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?