Slashdot Mirror
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.
RISC machines made sense before Intel figured out to make x86 go faster than one instruction per clock. That happened with the Pentium Pro, which came out in 1995. (The Pentium II and III were basically Pentium Pro architecture, shrunk down to a single die in a newer fab.) Transmeta didn't announce a product until 2000.
Before the Pentium Pro, RISC architectures seemed to be the way forward. The RISC designs could get down to one instruction per clock, and they weren't that hard to design, because all the hard cases were prohibited. I met the design team for one of the MIPS CPU parts, and it was about 15 people.
Intel took on the insanely hard problem of making a superscalar x86 CPU. All the awful things that can happen in x86 code had to be handled, and not only handled, handled fast. The internal complexity of the Pentium Pro/II/III is huge. It took a design team of 3000 people at peak to bring it off, and a huge transistor count in the CPU. Yet they did it. With that architecture, they could beat one instruction per clock, which blew away the whole rationale for nice, simple RISC machines. Transistors on the chip had become cheap enough that a CPU with 5.5 million transistors was commercially feasible.
Along with blowing away RISC, that technology blew away Transmeta. Transmeta had an OK idea, but they were five years too late.