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Torvalds's Former Company Transmeta Acquired and Gone
desmondhaynes sends along a posting from the TechWatch blog detailing the sale of Transmeta (most recently discussed here). Linus moved ten time-zones west, from Finland to Santa Clara, CA, to join Transmeta in March 1997, before this community existed. Here is our discussion of the announcement of the Crusoe processor from 2000. Our earliest discussion of Transmeta was the 13th Slashdot story. "Transmeta, once a sparkling startup that set out to beat Intel and AMD in mobile computing, announced that it will be acquired by Novafora. The company's most famous employee, Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000. Almost nine years later Transmeta's journey is over." Update: 11/21 16:25 GMT by KD : It's not the 13th Slashdot story, only the 13th currently in the database. We lost the first 4 months at one point.
I'll just leave this here.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
and Intel ran them out of business like so many others.
Intel ran Cyrix, Centaur, out of business and they got bought out. Intel stopped NEC (Remember the V20 CPU that replaced the 8088?), and almost ran VIA and AMD out of business.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
That a small start up could take on Intel in a serious way?
Well, that wasn't what killed them. There are many stories of garage companies taking on the fat, lazy big boys and winning (Microsoft/Apple against IBM, for one).
What killed them was the Fundamentally Wrong Approach. They wanted to, in essence, make a "magic optimizer" that would take Intel instructions and convert them to run on a very simple, low-power device. The "magic optimizer" was left as an "exercise to the geniuses". The business plan for that consisted solely of hand waving. "Hey, we'll just hire smart people and let them figure it out."
Unfortunately, optimization is a notoriously difficult problem, and is really a subset of Strong A.I. No one programs in assembly language these days, so one really understands how bad compilers really are at producing code, compared to human optimized code. Computers are so fast and programmers are so expensive, so we don't really care anymore.
Taking assembly and trying to translate/recompile it into another very-low-level assembly and do this on-the-fly without any time or performance penalty is a fool's game. It was never going to work. I could probably even dig up my posts on this subject way back when. :)
See also: VLIW processors, where the hardware guys fool themselves by saying, "the software guys will figure out how to compile to it."
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What killed Transmeta was a few things things:
Transmeta felt they were taking too many risks on the software side, and adopted a hyper-conservative culture on the hardware side. The result ended up being both late and below target. All the software optimizations in the world could not help push more operations down the pipe than it could actually perform.
As time went on, the cost of x86 decode and scheduling in hardware went down, and the cost of memory performance -- caching systems, and so on -- went up. The VLIW instruction set consumed more icache than the native x86 instruction set.
The best design in the world doesn't help if your fab partner don't deliver for their own design rules.