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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.
that something Linus worked on was a failure.
You mean he's human after all?
Oh the humanity.
From the article:
Transmeta today announced that Novafora will acquire Transmeta and its assets for $255.6 million in cash.
Transmeta's cash, cash equivalents and short term investments at September 30, 2008 totaled $255.2 million.
So, the entire worth of the company intellectual property was about $0.4M?
Layne
Makes me feel old... oh wait I am. Crap.
I'm not sure why that is ironic. Edison spent a lot of time failing. Ruth struck out a great many times.... this list can go on.
Now if he were a skydiver, that early failure might have put an end to the story, but still, no irony.
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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.
How ironic.
Note to Alanis Morisette: Rain on your wedding day is only ironic if you're marrying a weatherman
The raw performance of the chips wasn't very good either. They were low power and low performance in a ratio that didn't provide any benefits over Intel's solutions.
Plus working with small companies for such a vital part, wasn't in apple's interest. I think Apple learned its lesson working with Motorola. As big as it was, Motorola couldn't fulfill apple's meager request for power pc chips, nor could it fund development of faster chips.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If you count something as "wasted" just because it was a part of something that failed many years later, then virtually all of humanity's efforts are wasted in the long run.
E.g., what was the point of building cities and inventing civilization in Mesopotamia, since millenia later it fell to the semitic populations, then to the iranians (indo-europeans), and finally to the arabs? Even Sumerian, the language of the first human civilization, soon was a dead language kept just for religious services and texts. (Much like what millenia later would happen to Latin.) Was Hammurabi's life wasted on working on that law code and construction and whatnot, since he worked for Babylon which later got conquered by Assyria and today is just a bunch of ruins?
Was the life of every Roman that ever lived wasted, because their country would eventually implode and be conquered by a tribe as primitive as the Longobards?
Was Egipt all a big waste for that same reason?
Sometimes it makes sense to live in the present. It matters what you do now, not what will become of it in 10 years. What may make a difference in the long run is that you were one of the guys who tried and contributed a bit to the advancement of technology/culture/whatever, not whether you left some monumental legacy that will for ever be intact. Because if you're aiming for the latter, you might as well give up now, 'cause in the long run everything turns to dust.
Even the the Great Lighthouse, or the Colosus of Rhodes, or whatever, eventually turned to little more than ruins or disappeared altogether. Was it a waste of someone's years to build them? Well, no, they served their purpose while they existed, _and_ more importantly humanity learned something new in the process. Even if it's how to stack a lot of bricks to build a f-ing huge lighthouse. The road to the mighty gothic cathedrals of later, or to the Hagia Sophia, goes through such earlier achievements. Even if the grand monumental testament to someone's work is gone, their contribution to the species' knowledge lived on and accumulated.
Plus, in this case we're not even talking about some personal failure, but the failure of one company he worked for. Well, gee.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
But that was done on purpose, so they wouldn't hit the obvious wall that hurts all VLIW architectures: increasing IPC without changing the architecture, and without adding all the complex re-ordering logic seen in RISC-like superscalar processors. Once you get above one VLIW per clock, you have to throw the compiler's assumptions out the window, or you need to re-compile the code.
If you don't have to support the old architecture, you can change it to increase IPC without excessive overhead. This was the concept behind adding an interpreter layer between the chip and the OS. Of course, they didn't realize that they were trading one performance bugaboo for another: instead of making a bigger, more expensive chip, they sapped tons of performance doing x86 instruction transation and re-ordering in software. This cost them tons of performannce, as a lot of the time, their VLIW pipeline was only %50 filled.
Transmeta had the same problem Intel did with Itanium: with the exception of perfectly tailored code, the VLIW compiler couldn't keep processor resource utilization anywhere near %100. Transmeta had one additional problem over Intel: their compiler had to work in REAL TIME, with a tiny 16 or 32MB buffer. It's no wonder they got toasted by the x86 market..Itanium, even with Intel backing, is on the way to a similar fate.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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.
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.