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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.
LOL
Archives go back to December 31, 1997 but the site itself goes back to September. So I don't think that was the real 13th story.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I loved that too :D
Bot Assisted Blogging
-1 offtopic and offensive
A Pentium Pro was called that because it had on-die L2 cache that operated at core frequency, while Pentium II and Pentium III L2 was only operating on Bus frequency. Thus, a Pentium Pro 200MHz outperformed a Pentium II 400MHz (L2 under 100MHz Buz) and a Pentium III 700MHz (under a 133MHz Bus) just because it would have that 256KB or sometimes 512KB or 1MB of L2 that smacked-down the recent fast-talking bitches from Intel. I, personally, put my money on DEC and Microway Alpha workstations and rackmount servers classes 21164 and 21364. After Pentium Pro, Intel has been cheating with instruction set and fangled architecture glitches patched to a stable initialization. Every chip they design is built to fail to a model number on fabrication only detectable to a circuit test of an original design. It's amazing how they are crippleware, while the likes of Transmeta, SGI, DEC Alpha, and Hitachi Super-H get the boot despite 100% Linux server and workstation support all these years. Of'couse AMD is only the bitchboys of Intel wads.
Pentium Pro didn't have clock scalability: that was the original design. Just because Intel couldn't think of anything else but *extend* off Pentium Pro is no reason to mock a proper architecture. Pentium Pro was one of a kind, and Pentium II and Pentium III were just crap that they tried to scale but failed miserably. Like I said before back in 1999, Alpha is and was the greatest architecture ever to be invented. The 21164 Alpha had an undetected chip flaw that prevented it from showing the performance that it was originally built to accomplish: the 21264 was released years later with such a correction that caused it's performance to tripple even without the marketing addition of 1 *multimedia* instruction set. Meanwhile, Pentium II and Pentium III were just another frankenstein architecture mocking the better Pentium Pro but only to put something on the market with marketworthy MMX enhancements and the vibe that Intel is still progressing (which clearly was not the case until it bought DEC's Alpha intelectual property to roll into the Itanium architecture). Mind you, with all the Slashdot buz on Itanium all these years, there has still not been a stable Itanium server that I've come across. It's like it was always in development and just dropped-off the marketing map. The past 5 years of Intel has been absolute shit if it weren't for AMD's progress.