Slashdot Mirror
The Transmeta Conspiracy Part V
Floydian Slip sent us a link to Time Digital which has an amusing 20 Questions with Transmeta. It doesn't say much, but it seems to debunk a few theories. I'm hearing 'RSN' rumors now, but nothing concrete yet. I need moles in Transmeta dammit. I know you're reading, why won't you squeal?!
"The company's web site displays no images, no logo-just a plain gray screen with this sentence..."
The Transmeta web page is a plain _avocado_ screen, on my computer. I'd be willing to bet it's a plain black screen on my WYSE term.
Someone should tell Time Digital that they can configure settings for their desktop _and_ their browser.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
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Put Hemos through English 101!
"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
Just to clear things up. That is, that there isn't a single piece of Transmeta hype out there right now, though admittedly the buzz is being generated specifically due to a lack of hype.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
actually, in one of the recent interviews with young (or was it some other higher up guy at RH?) he was saying that other linux distributions aren't RH's competition - and that Microsoft was their competition.
ME RANTS AT. ME RANTS AT. ME RANTS AT.
why doesnt slashdot host a contest. closest one to guessing what transmeta really does, wins. :]
This one is super accurate - say, accurate enough to fire it from California, and hit someone in the head in, say, Redmond Seattle.
The barrel is 4 yards long, calibre .303 inches. It has taken 4 years to build so far because the barrel and rifling need to be 100% perfect for this level of accuracy. This requires 4 years of hand finished rifling grooves.
Once a round has been fired, the barrel then has to be discarded, as the wear from a single bullet will be enough to alter the accuracy.
The first (and only) round is due to be fired at midnight on New Years Eve, and all being well, will successfully blow billy's brains out.
The Cops in Seattle will be able to determine the direction that the shot came from, but no-one will be able to guess just how _far_ the bullet travelled.
SteveOC
Man! Go read a book or something. Build up some knowledge before flapping those lips. Such a casual disregard for the impact of the nazi regime is sad. It's ironic too, since your kind of casual dissasociation is the type of thing that made the nazis possible. Educate yourself instead of exposing your stupidity on public forums. Cocky, dimwitted kids make for tiresome reading here on /. .
Y'know, with just a little searching you can find a TransMeta spotters page containing all sorts of interesting tidbits.
There are already asynchronous chips. University of Manchester developed the Amulet2e, a ARM7 derivate, from 1993 to 1995. It is compatible to ARM-v4G instruction set.
Comparison data (I wish I could use tables):
CPU: ARM 710 -- Amulet2e fab process: 600nm -- 500nm transistor count: 570,000 -- 454,000 cache size: 8kB -- 4kB speed: 23 MIPS -- 38 MIPS
Even though the cache is only half as big it's faster.
Another one is the TITAC-2 developed in Japan. It is based on the MIPS R2000 but is not binary compatible.
Comparison for that:
CPU: TITAC-2 -- MIPS R2000 transistor count: 496,000 -- 100,000 core voltage: 3.3V -- 5V power consumption / w/o cache: 2.11W / 1.02W -- - / 2W performance / w/o cache: 54.1 MIPS / 26.5 MIPS -- - / 12 MIPS
The TITAC-2 worked with 1.5V to 6V in environment temperatures of -196C to 100C (-320F to 212F, if I calculated correctly).
Clocked chips have to be clocked slow enough for the worst case (a set of commands that take a really long time before the chip enters a stable state), that's why overclocked / overheated CPUs work fine most of the time but only sometimes crash. These async CPUs get faster when they get cooler. They always run as fast as is possible given the temparature and commands to execute.
Rumors tell that German company Hagenuk will employ the Amulet3 in commercial products this year.
If you want to know more about micro pipelines, null convention logic and dual rail encoding, look it up in c't 17/99 (if you have that issue or want to reorder it and can read German of course ;-)
How's about A MARS TENT, or A SMART NET? the possibilities are endless . . .
C'mon, the speculation is ended.
In that case it would be a sequel to Java - 'Palava', perhaps ;-)
Wouldn't it be funny if they spent so long underground developing this amazing product to change the world, and then when they finally come up to release it, they find someone's already done it?
Summary: they're loving this hype!
insignificant sig
Also, it would not be prone to allow alien intelligences to patch its kernel just like that, nor would it crash as often, nor would it be easy for Quark to achieve higher security status.
Let's all be happy for that.
if ( !(strcmp(temp_string,"TransmetaNow"))) { sprintf(vendor,"%s","Transmeta "); /* Hehe this is a joke. No I have no clue what *\ \* Transmeta does. ;) */ }
To display html comments (or any other tags, or things in angle brackets)(we'll see if this works):
<!-- html comment -->
all i did was use < for the < and use > for the > (id assume thats Less Than and Greater Than)
also, i posted using plain old text
(also, i will assume that despite my preview (which worked properly) that this post still will not work)
http://members.hyperlink.net.au/~chart/download/ve ndors.txt
1279 Transmeta Corp
Various ramblings
You can't possibly buy publicity this good, any attempt by transmeta to clarify what they are working on will effectively end the mystery and all the publicity that goes with it.
The only way you can clarify your position without killing the pr at this point is to exceed all expectations. Since transmeta hasn't annonced anything I suspect that they don't have anything that'll really wow the geek population yet and they're waiting until they do.
What would happen if within the next hour transmeta reeals that all this time it had been working on a 3 mips processor? There would be people that would just walk away disapointed, and people that are so wrapped up in this they'd refuse to believe it excusing it as a cover story to draw attention away from their real product.
- MbM
- MbM
Hi John, this is Mr. Ditzel.
We'd love to have you, no interview required. Just fly on over tomorrow. I'll be waiting at the airport. Oh, and as a signing bonus, you'll be recieving some beachfront property in Arizona. We can't wait to have you on board.
Aye... and you need it!
>Or they must be at least
>writing a compiler for it...
Steve Johnson (who wrote yacc and pcc) works
there, so they probably have that one in hand.
Note: back at Bell Labs, Steve was Dave Ditzel's
boss for a while when Ditzel and Rae Maclellan
were designing the Crisp microprocessor, whose
branch-folding scheme smacks of the sort of
code-rewriting that the most interesting
Transmeta rumors feature.
Another former Labbie at Transmeta is Pat
Parseghian.
-Tom Duff
Quick, bust out Hiroaki!
InThane
They already distributed a press release. It was a page of paper that said "This press release is not yet here."
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Anyone know how much investment there has been in Transmeta? The article only mentioned $20 mil, which has got to be just a small amount of what has been invested. Software startups eat that much in a year or so. God knows how much more overhead there is with a hardware startup, especially one that is 4 years old and located in the high-rent Silicon Valley.
I guess with the #3 $$$ guy on your side, funding is less of an issue. If they had to turn to investment bankers more, they would definitly have to give some details of what they are doing, and that increases the risk of something slipping out somehow.
Even so, after 4 years, it's probably getting towards the put-up-or-shutup (or shutdown) stage there.
I can see it now... "To boldly code where no man has debugged before..."
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Oh, but then why did he (attempted to) cancel that article? :) BTW, another "sign" for something may be that another Transmeta employee just contributed support for the picojava architecture to the Cygnus binutils stuff (assembler, linker, you know).
The "can emulate a few processors and more" theory stands on strong base, IMHO :)
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
Nerds for News :-)
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
You get your cadre of engineers, programmers, or whatever kind of personnel you need to work on your project, don't say anything about what you're doing, and hire a really famous person or two (a la Linus Torvalds), and the media will create all the hype in the world for you.
Why is that, you may wonder? Because a) every other company in Silicon Valley and wherever else is/has/will make some sort of marketing campaign, more likely than not (so what makes these guys so special that they won't?) and b) there are few things people love more than rumor mills, conspiracy theories, and random speculation. If you don't say anything about your product, it makes it all the easier for the media to make up stuff (and let's face it, the media is well-known for "creating" stories out of virtually nothing when there's nothing better to report on.
I mean, think about it.. Transmeta is a perfect candidate for this kind of "media hype".
~ Kish
Anyway, with regards to the speculated ability to execute binaries for x86, PowerPC etc, that's sort of similar to some of the things Sun's MAJC chip will do, which has also been in development for a long time. The MAJC chip doesn't literally execute Java byte-code but it's easier to translate to than other architectures - you still need a JVM. You can just run C/C++ binaries normally too - so yes, you can port Linux to it. However, what this means is that you don't have to support old versions and you can optimise best for each generation.
Here is a transcript of a live chat with the MAJC architecture lead designer, and they discuss some interesting things. (yes, someone does ask how easy it would be to do a Linux port ^-^)
Like the company, the phrase is entirely vague: "Above the beyond."
Wrong. (Doesn't anyone study Latin and Greek anymore?)
trans is Latin, and means across, beyond. meta is Greek, and means with, among, beyond, after, next. (Don't ask me how it got to mean both with/among and beyond/after.) I assume the name is supposed to mean "Beyond the next"
Hypertrans or Supermeta would mean "Above the beyond", to the extent it would mean anything.
Cut 'em a little slack. If they were using Internet Explorer the page would have been white.
But then it could be just another Tera MTA...
There actually was another Darkman, and another after that! They both sucked, but the original Darkman was pretty good. Hey, you have to love Sam Raimi's movies!
In a weird twist of fate, Tansmeta may very well be the Darkman of processors, but for an entirely differnt reason! Like Darkman, Transmeta works in complete secrecy, and like Darkman, Transmeta can appear to be any processor, just like Darkman can appear to be any man.
Darkman indeed.
The POT submitter does not bowdlerise HTML, it just keeps line breaks: s/\\n/
/ I guess
The chip referred to in 2 was a software programmable array, and when you say "environment sensitive" what actually happened was the circuit design only worked on one particular chip (not one part number, one physical chip).
When the virtual digital circuit design was examined, it made no sense at all.
The guy had worked it up by using genetic algorithms to "breed" the bit strings representing the virtual circuit. He was only using Darwinian selection as a success criterion, and what happened was he bred a design which happened to cause the right analogue effects on that particular chip to make it resonate at the target frequency (I thought it was higher than 100Hz) and thus generate a result which was spurious at a digital level, but nevertheless correct.
There was a big piece about it in either SA or Nature about a year ago.
>I doubt there will be anything usable in that area for several years, if not decades
I think you're too pessimistic. IIRC, there was an asynchronous implementation of the ARM ISA called Amulet, which was just a hair away from going commercial. If they could get that close a few years ago, it's no stretch to think someone else might go all the way this year or next.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
I predict that the next revelation will be that Andover.net is a fully-owned subsidiary of Transmeta. It's all so clear now.
Now where'd I put my copy of X-Files Revealed?
How do you know he tried to cancel it?
From what I see he actually cancelled *another* (cancel not ) msg.
Egoine
Umm...what exactly does an abacus soaked in Jell-O feel like?
And here I thought everybody who reads slashdot is a geek.
My assumption has always been that the name gives an obvious clue. Anyone who has ever used the UML has noted the possible value in creating an object-oriented system that implements metaobjects to a greater or lesser degree.
Any number of people are working on this, hoping it will be the next big breakthrough in computing. (I admit I am.) Damian Conway suggested at the Perl Conference that he sees it as a way to win the Larry Wall Award again next year.
"Transmeta" suggests to me they are trying to do metaobjects, probably at greater-degree level mentioned above.
QED
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Actually Intel has been doing this all along. That's why the PII and PIII were introduced at such low prices compared to for example the 486 or first Pentiums.
AMD is in a position with the Athlon to compete against the Xeon's as well. Their capable of a larger cache then the Xeon's as well as using a much better bus for multiprocessing. While Intel still uses the same 100 MHZ bus in dual and quad systems for all processor communication the EV6 bus allows for more. In the EV6 bus each of the processors have their own bus to memory and I/O. In addition each bus can be clocked at up to 400 MHZ according to current specs. It is more difficult to implement for more then 2 processors but it can easily support up to at least 32 processors while Intel has to play games with their bus to get up to just 8.
Until Intel changes their system bus significantly AMD will be able to blow them away when the proper motherboards are released. Also this bus will allow AMD to go toe to toe with Sun, IBM, SGI, and Alpha on multiprocessing should they choose to do so.
If you haven't tried it, you haven't lived.
/. we welcome people with all kinds of abacus orientations.
Maybe some narrow types don't approve of that, but I like to think that on
>Theseus Logic and Cogency are two that come to mind
Good links, and thank you. Cogency looked very real and very interesting to me, and I encourage others to check it out. Theseus, though...well, that's different. I couldn't decide whether it was a buzzword-filled scam a la Starbridge, or a deliberate parody. Treated as humor, I particularly liked the "Critical Review of the Notion of the Algorithm in Computer Science".
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Because the 23rd century is when it will finally be released :)
Com'n guys! Untill you tell us something, wild rumors about what Transmeta really does will persist.
What's that noise? (/me looks out window) Uh oh. Black helicopters. Gotta get to the f$0n>3nq[x
Connection closed by foreign host.
Ceçi n'est pas une pipe.
transmeta and amiga are both vaporware companies. they have no project. that and transmeta is owned by microsoft thereby making torvalds on the payroll of big bad billy gates.
It's derived from:
a) "Transmute", the ability to change one element into another. Product is a chip that can change its internal instruction set.
b) trans, meaning "beyond", and metus, meaning "fear". product is irrelevent, just a cool name.
c) a 50+ word score in scrabble
(And yes, I've studied Latin, see sig)
--
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
Dvorak and Cringely consistently produce great columns with insight about the state of computing. Dvorak himself has done so for many years before his comments on the new Mac iBooks (or whatever they're called) ruffled the feathers of the MacFanatics (as opposed to "reasonable Mac users") Can you elaborate why he wouldn't be respected?
I really hope they DO deliver and it's not just all vapourware.
:)
I know we all love conspiricy(?) theories/secret stuff etc. but if they can deliver it could well end up being a major step forward.
Iggy
P.S Wouldn't you just love to have a job there
This makes me sick :( I can not even aford to patent my research and these guys waste money left and right. The year is 1999 and computers/operating systems "still" suck :(
And one for "Bill Gates" is "Steal GLib" ...er, Ivan Suds Troll...er...
Hmmm...WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH LINUS TORVALDS?
Is Transmeta taunting us?
The company's web site displays no images,
no logo-just a plain gray screen with this sentence: "This web page is not here yet!" In the source code for the page (which everyone has looked at in hopes of finding buried treasure), another sentence reads, "There are no secret messages in the source code to this web page."
I haven't used a web-browser that defaults the page background to that lovely gunmetal grey, in about 3 years!
"So what could Transmeta be making to excite such unparalleled interest and talent? We read all we could find on the subject (not much) and talked to everyone we could pin down (not many), including Torvalds; David Ditzel, Transmeta's CEO; and Linley Gwennap, publisher and editorial director of Microprocessor Report. The more we pushed and probed, the more it felt as if we were playing some kind of elaborate Silicon Valley parlor game. Rather than a list of all the tortured permutations, what follows are the best answers we could muster."
"Why would Torvalds, the inventor of the world's best-known free operating system, go to work there?"
Of course, all debate about Richard Stallman, GNU, and Linux aside (just for the record, I don't really care /what/ you call the damn thing, so there's disclaimer #1), I could probably tell these people another reason why their research ran into a little "difficulty". :)
(well, unless you consider "OS" to be synonymous with "kernel" [or even "not just the kernel" as in "the kernel and a little more than the kernel" or whatever], in which case this joke doesn't apply to you.. and there's disclaimer #2)
~ Kish
pff.
I guess you're just waiting for them to IPO, too.
What do competitors say?
;)
When the Federal Trade Commission investigated Intel on antitrust charges last year, whom do you think the giant chipmaker cited to prove that it has serious competition in the microprocessor market? Transmeta.
Is it only me or does it feel like the fact that Intel when under antitrust charges has to prove it's got competition uses a company that hasn't produced anything yet (not bashing transmeta, stating a fact). This is an even worse example of competition than the one Microsoft used in court that mentioned Redhat. Even though you could argue about if RH is a threat to MS they at least have a product out on the market. Seems like Intel had a hard time finding their competition
Try reading the article next time.
*Intel* cited them as a competitor.
But flames aside, I thought the same thing. (About Intel that is) Why would they cite Transmeta as a competitor if the only thing they're producing is rumor? And how could the DOJ accept that as a valid argument?
It seems like there may be more knowledge outside Transmeta than we all think...
Why doesn't transmeta have a decent webpage?
Why don't they have any products?
Howcome only a couple of patents?
Why no press releases?
Trust me on this, they're just too darn busy playing q3a..
I wish Transmeta the best, and of course I would love a chip that can emulate x86 faster than an Athlon, but face it, this is pure speculation, and if history is any indicator, the speculation that is created to fill information voids about tech startups usually exceeds whatever is eventually marketed.
We saw this last week as details emerged about the Handspring Visor. For months I heard that the original Palm developers were coming out with a unit that (check all that apply): was twice as fast, had a larger, high-resolution color display, longer battery life, more memory and a smaller, ultra-futuristic case that belongs on the set of the next Star Trek movie. While the new Visor is impressive, and a significant progression over the current Palm line in price, performance and expandibility, it doesn't approach the hype.
A company that employs a godfather of Linux and which reveals nothing about itself is reported to be inventing a chip that is astonishingly faster than anything else out there, capable of emulating any of the other major platform, and cheaper than all other high-end processors. Unlikely.
My wild guess at what Transmeta is up to some form of asynchronous logic design. A lot of the fabless chip companies have been making similar promises with that area of research. Theseus Logic and Cogency are two that come to mind. Clocked logic has its limits and the Intels and Motorolas of the world are going to hit those limits sooner or later. And barring any sudden developments in, say, quantum comptuing, asynchronous logic is the next, ahem, logical step. It's much quicker, much more flexible (didn't surprise me about the emulation speeds transmeta boasted of)and should consume less power, if done right. Transmeta, or their followers, is touting all three benefits. Asynchronous logic design actually has been around for awhile, though its always required a complexity of design that makes it more expensive to pull off. But as clocked logic is getting so complex, it might soon be the time where they'll be equivalent, cost-wise. Then again, Transmeta could be up to something *completely* different. joab
one of the biggest names in the open source community works for a company so closed that they won't even discuss what their product is? Or does?
And is funded by an ex-microsoft founder? Thats money from MS Windows licenses that you're buying your groceries with Linus!
My predicition is they go the same way as MicroUnity and the MediaProcessor, remember that?
Sorry, I patented the Nacho process years ago. The cheese is actuallly a polymer that prevents the chips from oxidizing. It comes with a nice petroleum sauce for dipping!
THEY, I mean THEM
THEY are two groups, one group tries to maintain stablitly and the other group works against stablitly. That is who THEY are.
Transmeta, is the group that is responsiable for maintaining stabitly, while Microsoft is responsiable for destorying this stabitly. No I am not talking about OS either.
The co-founder of Microsoft is playing an intresting role, in the public view, something set for by Microsoft to make us doubt transmeta and to revert society into a parinoid little hole.
Transmeta, can't go public, what do you think would happen if they said they where the force behind the NWO? (No not wrestling, New World Order, -George Bush!)
This does to things, transmeta can keep a another little "Hilter" event from happening again (thank you M$ for the first one), and second provide cloak for Linus to work.
The first one was explain early (remeber the NWO stuff, what you got bad memory man) the second one is this:
Linus is God, but he is also human.
He needs food, water, sleep, this is a fact, I can prove it! For Linus to do this, he need money, to get money he needs a job.
Linux is a full time project for Linus, so he to surive on the planet and develop linux for the furture of man kind, he needs a job doing kernel hacking on Linux, that pays decent money.
Do you think RedHat would hire him? Hell ya, do you think SuSe would, hell ya, they (distro people) all would.
What would this lead to, it wouldn't be redhat Linux anymore it would be REDHAT linux, it wouldn't be suse Linux, it would be SUSE linux.
The user base would split, Linux wouldn't have the support to grow into a world wide concept of sharing, and that little "Hilter" thing, that would rear it's ugly head..
Transmeta was founded by all the linux distro out there, redhat or slackware didn't hire Linuz, they all did, and that is the real deal.
This CPU a cop out man, get with the program, become on with the program, make sweet love to the program, uh scratch that last one.... sigh
"Java of the Hardware world...hmmm...if Transmeta can do a fast emulation of any chip, could it also do a fast emulation of the Java virtual machine? After all, Sun did have a chip to run the Java instructions natively....
Hmm. Now, I'm going by memory here, since I don't have the magazine handy. But last month's Scientific American (or the month before's) had a big whack of articles on the Oxygen computing environment being developed at MIT. One of the keys was a self-modifying chip that would reconfigure itself when you downloaded software onto it to get a massive speed advantage - you're limited in that you can only have your PDA act as one thing at a time (web browser, MP3 player, whatever) but because it remakes the hardware when you load the code you get incredible optimization.
t ml
The little dribbles we're hearing about Transmeta's product sounds like it could be the same type of technology but on a larger scale. If it's so great at emulating the i386, perhaps that's because it'll have an "i386" template and rewire itself to use that when it runs 386 code? Pure speculation, of course.
Hey, wait a minute - sure I have the magazine handy! It's right here: http://www.sciam.com/1999/0899issue/0899agarwal.h
Joe
A number of industry analysts have mentioned the cautionary tale of MicroUnity, another Silicon Valley chipmaker that shrouded itself in secrecy while rumors of its revolutionary chip swirled. MicroUnity burned through $200 million of venture capital and never shipped a product. "One of the bigger craters, as we say," notes Gwennap dryly.
Yes. Or to be more blunt, product talks, bullshit walks. Even if they don't state specifically what products they're working on, they could give enough points at what markets they're after.
Here's a question for you conspiracy specialists: Why would Linus Torvalds, Super Geek, essentially work for Paul Allen, midwife to the Great Satan Microsoft? Could it be the fact that Allen is the third richest man in the world? And how do strong Linux supporters really feel about Linus that close to Allen? Wouldn't that be considered a serious conflict of interest? Or is Gates, through Allen, hedging his bets by essentially financing Linux kernel development and direction in case Windows really does fail?
"*breep* Error, cannot comply, please rephrase your command in the form of a question"
If the Enterprise ran Win2k, they would have to fill every wall of the ship with Ram, and the holodeck would go at quarter speed :)
but not proximity :)
Hi all,
couldn't we figure out what they are up to by looking who is working there ? I mean by looking at the capabilites of these people what do we know ? Do we have an idea of the company structure, ie who many (and which) people are working in which department.
Just a guess
brrrrrr it's cold
Transmeta will fail because they are not open sourced. That is why one of the cofounder of the Secret Police invested in it. The Gustapo's intention is to invests in the Gustapo Jr. Move all their apps off the other half of WinTel and take over the world in both the hardware and software field. Of course, they'll just produce M$Linux at the end to convert all the anti M$ diehards. Which Linux user would not love to jump into using the real 'doze95 front end instead of using all the other '95 posers such as KDE, Enlightment etc.
We must resist the Evil empire and its evil offspring at all cost. Even Linus has poisoned Linux ever since joining the dark side of the force. String the kernel and search for command.com if you don't believe me. Sold out to insert a viral spreading incubator right in the core of the OS.
Everyone should start running their own OS in their own CPU. Use the brain as the computer. Don't think OS, think application. Interface directly with your imagination and utilize your own processing power to halucenate anything you want. Even do your own 2+2 instead of using dc/bc. Forget bewolf, use your 2 hands and 2 feet to do 4 way parallel processing. This would be the ultimate open source, since all this knowledge is build into our DNA and everybody has access to it.
The new processor being developed at Transmeta searches the internet for Porn. It has the ability to quickly crack most porn site passwords and filter out newsgroup spam. Next, it filters out the softcore fluff and leaves behind the hard stuff. Then, it quickly begins generating mpeg's at full screen resolution with stereo sound using the above hard stuff as the basis for the new full length erotic masterpieces. Do not be mislead by its poor performance on the Intel Pornmedia benchmarks as they did not wish to license PMX but rather came up with their own extensions. Total cost of chip: $10
Forth CPU: Like F21 CPU
Functional CPU: Like NeoSilicone ?
Maybe... this way to explore...
- More info about F21 CPU: http://www.dnai.com/~jfox/f21.html
- More info about haskell: http://www.haskell.org/
"Kill the Computer !" [PURGE]Of course, when MS does that kind of thing, it's generally better if its vaporware than a real announcement.. Mainly because it would be more likely to simply be more unstable than the alternatives (and be "designed" to do it all and more, but never actually live up to those design specs). I hope Transmeta lives up to the hype.
~ Kish
So did I just take the hint wrong or did they pull down the page this hint refers to?
1) They hired Linus Torvalds.
2) Oh.. there is no number 2
Transmeta must be as interesting as the university of Helsinki.
As to SA, I think the first article I read about FPGA's was in SA about 2 years ago... I'm diggin' out my paranoid bone here, but I find it odd that it made such a small splash when it came out... my first thought was "this will rock the UNIVERESE!!!" hhheeemmmm...
I'm also wondering if Transmeta has bought a little talked-about NIC card company that was listed in the Linux Journal a few months back(forgive, I don't remeber which month).
wha-hurd,
--shift8
wa-hurd, --shift8
The third line is not true, because there appears to be a typo. (humour, I guess)
The fifth line is not strictly true, because it is the Transmeta home page.
The seventh line is not true as the page is certainly there.
Is the second line the only true line?
I have proven that it is mathmatically impossible to turn empty soda cans into gold (using only household ingredients) but this Slashdot comment box is too small for me to type the proof here.
---
Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
...cmon spit it out...
EG&G
And for all you Linux guru's out there they appear to be running Linux....though which flavor I can't tell.
But when he later tried to *cancel* it...(you can see his cancel request on deja)...
Now that's just embarrassing. If he had left it there, he could have at least passed it off as a joke.
...and I'm not telling. I think you all will thank me when they finally announce what they're up to. It's tremendously cool, and could be spoiled if anyone told.
That being said, I do think "I know what transmeta does" would be a great title for a sci-fi/horror flick. It just lends so much to the imagination.
And no, I will NOT answer any emails regarding the subject.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
IMHO the guys at TransMeta (read: Transport Metastuff) got smart and analysed the technology they've been using the last couple of years. This is not so difficult IF (you accept that all technology has an end) AND (you are smart, like Linus (probably, I haven't met him :))) AND (willing to let go of the concept of hardware vs. software). Mi2e-2
nosig today
This was burried, but valuable. Thanks Chexum.
:)
Subject: Re: OpenGL mini drivers?
Date: 1999/03/31
Author: Dave Taylor
I think that Sean Baggaley pitched in with Russ Williams' pet anti-OpenGL sentiments because they're both British. It's obvious. I mean, come on. Evil empire. Elitist snobs. Still bitter about the "colonials" on the other side of the "puddle." Duh.
I love the D3D vs OpenGL struggle. I love the consistently inconsistent visuals you get from playing 3D games on today's PC's. I wish Microsoft and SGI would reduce each other to charred cinders with patent infringement lawsuits.
John uses OpenGL because he can afford to. He can lose hundreds of thousands of sell-throughs and be perfectly happy. Christ, he could throw every copy of Quake 3 in a wood chipper and sell the chaff to the government for use in hideous anti-personel weapons against the Serbs, and he would still make a killing on the royalty advances. This has always been John's modus operandi, whether he was turning a monster dime or a modest dime, and we should be thankful. Others follow suit because John's products become the IHV's benchmarks, so the IHV's improve their drivers and hardware to work with John's games, and so other game developers can eventually switch over. I think this is a better system than following Microsoft's lead just because one of their over-worked engineers or megalomaniac managers decided to arbitrate a new standard.
There's an alternative. You don't see anyone hotly debating whether to use DirectDraw. You don't see video glitches on games that use software renderers. They just work. They just deliver exactly what you specified and never crash. Sure, you have to come up with innovative gameplay and/or excellent artwork, but the technique has been a solid technique for hit-making from Myst to Heroes 3.
I am quite happy for the 3D cards and API's to beat each other black and blue while the real engineers either deal with what's available or quietly work on the solution to this whole mess.
Here's a fun multiple-choice quiz. What do you suppose that long-term solution is?
- A. Waiting for Nvidia to come out with the TNT N (as N gets large).
- B. Waiting for 3DFX to come out with the Voodoo N (as N gets large).
- C. Waiting for Matrox to come out with the GN00 (as N gets large).
- D. Waiting for ATI to come out with the Rage * (as * gets goofy).
- E. Waiting for OpenGL to get caps bits.
- F. Waiting for D3D code to be easier to read.
- G. Waiting for someone really brave to come out with a general-purpose processor w/ an open architecture that is suitable for high-performance parallel processing so that we have complete control over every pixel and get a consistent, high-quality, fast, innovative graphic experience.
I leave it to you, noble reader. (but if you pick anything but G., then you have gooey fluff where your brains should be, nyah)
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
no...What they are actually doing, is setting up some baite, so you keep checking back to see what this big suprise is. Does anyone really think that if transmeta starts to make major dough that paul allen is gonna block his buddy bill from the action? Linus may as well rewrite the linux kernel with win32 and get to the point.
When my friends and I sit around and speculate what we would do with all that money (if we ever became even a tenth as rich as Paul Allen), someone always comes up with the idea of hiring the smartest technical people that we could find, putting them in a building together, letting them do whatever they wanted and seeing what they came up with. Call it giving back to the community.
Transmeta has been around for years and has not officially produced anything. They buzz/hype builds up and then dies down on a cyclical basis. Transmeta is clearly enjoying it - they could kill this type of hype easily if they wanted - but they don't. I think this is directly attributable to their sense of humor.
Maybe this is Paul Allen's way of giving back to the community. If this is the case, then the joke is - there will never be a product.
Perhaps Intel was hoping that the DOJ would force Transmeta into revealing what is going on in there.
I was watching the Discovery channel a year ago, this was before their awesome program, On The Inside, that would normally handle these sorts of stories. Anyways, they were doing a story on Area 51, the myth, the facts, what not. The story was about 2 hours long and the last 30 min or so involved the idea that real people worked there so where did these people come from? Turns out that they were bused in via nodescript busses from Las Vegas to Las Vegas International Airport and then flown in nondescript 737s to Area 51. They also mentioned the name of the contracting company that supplied the workers. I can't be sure as it has been a while, but I think that the name of the company was Transmeta. Does anyone else remember this? Surely I have mixed up my facts somehow. I can't imagine Linus working with the spooks on a secret government project.
But then that could explain the revolutionary chip rumors if they got the tech from aliens.
Paul Allen hasn't had much to do with MS (other than owning stock) for years. Besides, even if that article you linked to made the statement, "Microsoft invested in Transmeta"(which it didn't), that's not proof. That's some journalist making a statement.
meta-anything means, roughly, something that describes the "anything".
Meta-architecture, means "architecture (our chip) about architecture (the chips we can pretend to be)".
There was a PhD dissertation and a project at Stanford about something like this a few years ago. Guess where the star student is working?
Well, this reply is a little late since I haven't been able to access /. all day.
Basically, 'well respected' carries the connotation of at least grudging respect across the whole audience in question. I would submit that 'controversial' is a more apt description since Dvorak elicits such varying responses from people. As for me personally, I've found some columns of his fairly insightful, while others were downright moronic (and this dates well before the iBook flap) -- in my book (no pun intended) 'well respected' would indicate a consistent level of quality which I think he lacks.
Within the Linux community, Linus is 'well respected' while RMS might be described as 'controversial'. Among those familiar with Apple, Woz might be described as 'well respected' while Jobs would be 'controversial'.
I don't necessarily mean controversial in a perjorative sense -- it may well turn out that the 'controversial' person is right in the long run and the 'well respected' person just didn't make waves. It just didn't strike me that 'well respected' was accurate in describing Dvorak's perception in just about any community, because he does tend to polarize people.
No, it means their mail server gets its power from a cold fusion machine (which uses a palladium coil) which was invented over a bottle of Jack Daniels.
CONTROL looks at the execution stream of the current process, then reconfigs the gates of PROCCESSING to match the *optimized* %^) HW arch. for the process, then PROCESSING executes it while CONTROL looks the the next stream.
But, I talk from out my annal... total speculation... and as far as I know (which isn't much &^) a round-robin version of this idea, without the HW optimization, is how normal SMP works.
mia $.02
--shift8
wa-hurd, --shift8
I've got a friend (maybe acquantiance is a better word) who threw in his job as a web designer to become a latex models technician on the Lord of The Rings project that is happening down country here with Peter Jackson's Weta company.
His first reply back said something along the lines of: I'm here, I'm safe, I've got somewhere to live. I'm seeing lots of really cool things here, but I can't tell anyone, or else I'll be fired. Apparently this has already happened to someone...
Transmeta people can't say anything, because they all want to continue to do the cool work for Transmeta.
... and today's pet project has
Transmeta hires Linus for programming skills and hype thusly generated. In return Linus gets to spend part of his time porting the Linux kernel to the new processor and so when the chip gets released it is running Solaris, NT, etc.. in emulation and running Linux natively. Sounds like a path to world domination to me...
One 'big' serious reason AMD will make it with the Athlon. Same reason Linux is getting a 'huge' influx of microsoft junkies.
....their done. They've been in the same mindset/chipset so long....they know nothing else.
They are fed up and sick of paying too much for hyped up mediocre products.
I think that anyone that has put a 450 MHZ Intel and a 450 MHZ AMD up against each other has noticed no real difference except for maybe the 300+ dollars.
Likewise....how much does Winblows 95/98 cost brand spankin new!? How bout NT/Server with all the licensing costs!? Then d/load Linux and which one actually has more security/functionality!?
The fat cats have eaten their fill....unless they come out with something absolutely phenomenal..
Which is prolly why Intel sited TransMeta as competition.
They know we are tired of the hype and so does TransMeta. So ya know, I hope they do come out with something that blows everyone outta the water. Then, we can respect them not only for what they have accomplished....but also...for giving us the benefit of not being duped yet again by hype.
I wonder if Transmedia is less of a threat to Intel now that they are out of the graphics chip business. (Referenced rumor that Transmedia's chip, among other things, would make a really cool CPU for a parallelized 3d video card.)
Certainly if it were linux it:
a) Would not have a female voice
b) Would not be operated in the current fashion of:"Computer: solve problem" "Computer cure disease", "Computer defeat alien invasion fleet", but would certainly require more complex, more detailed commands
Transmeta's website code (letter-for-letter).
Pay careful attention to line 3.
0. <HTML>
1.
2. <!-- There are no secret messages in the source code to this web page. -->
3. <!-- There are no tyops in this web page. -->
4.
5. <TITLE>Not yet the Transmeta home page</TITLE>
6. <BODY>
7. This web page is not here yet!
8. </BODY>
9. </HTML>
Not necessarily very insightful or anything, just a tad amusing...
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
These alien corpses take *way* longer to microwave than anyone expected....
The trick my grandfather told me is to moisten them up a bit. Water absorbs the microwave energy much more efficiently than these desicated, largely silicon remains do.
Steamed alien also goes better with the nachos that never go stale.
Lifes in the Bay Area? Speaks without a Finnish accent? Who is this impostor?! I think the real Linus is jailed at Area 51 while this cloned dup has been created to some nefarious purpose.
Or maybe Paul is finally tired of playing second fiddle to a bumbling fool and sees trasnmeta as his way to overtake Bill.
F /...
Unlike Bill, Paul has some pretty amazingly diverse investments and interests. Even if the mighty Microsoft were to fail he is covered in so many ways he wouldn't have to worry about falling out of the top ten richest people in the world.
---
Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
You fools, that story was nothing but a way to grep the minds of slashdot.org users on this forum, YUCK they are doing martket research right now, on this board.
I believe so. Look in the program linux_logo (Ships with Linux-Mandrake 6). Using vi, I found the lines where it has the processor name and the cute little tag-line. Intel-GenuineIntel, Cyrix-CyrixInstead, etc. Funny, there is a Transmeta line. Transmeta-TransmetaNow!
-- Terry
Seems like Intel had a hard time finding their competition Hmm... a company that doesn't even have the fastest processor in their own market is hardly a monopoly! The Athalon proves that the x86 chip market is still competitive. But I suppose it wasn't around during their trial... so it didn't really help. What is DOES prove is that hi-tech anti-trust suits suffer from a lack of foresight (Yes, I am including MS) -rt
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Well their appoint Geraldo Rivera (of Al Capone's vaults fame) to CEO doesn't bode well.
transmeta.COM name server ns.transmeta.COM
transmeta.COM name server ns1.best.COM
transmeta.COM name server ns2.best.COM
transmeta.COM name server ns3.best.COM
neosilicon.transmeta.COM has address 206.184.214.14
best-gw-aux.transmeta.COM has address 206.184.214.33
ssl.transmeta.COM has address 206.184.214.15
localhost.transmeta.COM has address 127.0.0.1
neon-best.transmeta.COM has address 206.184.214.10
www.transmeta.COM has address 206.184.214.11
loghost.transmeta.COM has address 127.0.0.1
best-gw.transmeta.COM has address 206.184.214.1
ns.transmeta.COM has address 206.184.214.14
neosilicon? new silicon? Interesting. Please commence out-of-control speculation... NOW.
Dear Mr Ditzel
I would like to work for you on the basis that you are interested in producing a sophisticated compiler which will make use of VLIW and parallelism of code I have an morbid interest of this type of system.
I understand that your project incorporates the use of streamed data and operation on such data and think that I would be able to help having previous experience in the operation of MPEG2 encoding and decoding and the interdependent data processing associated with it.
My skills that would be of use to you are writing complex low level functions in C and machine code. I also have good Java understanding and I think that this would help in your project dealing with code templates. Dealing with understanding of the parallel nature of those templates and why it is necessary in clusters of microprocessors.
I have a period of one year before I plan to return to academic life and would like a interesting employer as all previous work has been in large companies.
Regards
John Jones
P.S. I apologise to all posters of slashdot as I know they may not want to read this but I find communicating with this company very frustrating. I hope you may glean a little knowledge of what they want from my application.
a poor student @ bournemouth uni in the UK (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
cpeterso
cpeterso
however I don't recall who the company was.
Standard Disclamer: IANAL I think the standard agreement (the only thing I'll ever sign anyway) simply states that anything developed using company resources is the property of the company.
besides that, there is no way any one company could legaly usurp the Linux kernel. The original code was written long before Transmeta, and Linus didn't write the whole thing anyway. Additionally, many (maybe all) GNU projects require a release from your employer before they'll accept your code. I'd provide a link stating as much, but I don't have the time right now...sorry.
Transmeta has managed to keep the lid on quite tight.
:-) /. moderation to level 5 would get them talk,,,,,)
And good for them.
I'm betting that the reason the lid is on tight is simple. Money.
There is a Bonus-payout on announcement date clause that the payout goes downhill the more information that is leaked.
So:
If tounges don't wag, big money, big prizes.
If the tounges DO wag, a sliding scale to zero.
With a bouns on EACH check as a reminder that the phrase "Silence is Golden" has meaning)
Now play a new game....how much would you have to pay someone to talk
(Perhaps auto-magik
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Ok, lemme give you some background to this firstly... About 6 months ago i had a very interesting chat to a fellow i know that is one of the most paranoid people i have ever meet, during the chat he came out and told me that intel had developed a trully AI cpu, so i figured that this is possible, but not probible.. so i just went on with my averages days rat race...
:)
Now, with all this talk about what transmeta is doing, although i do like the idea about Paul Allen paying them to play in a building and see what they come up with, i dont think so. So what the hell, lets thing about this now, you want a processor that can do X86 and all the other types of processers, what is one kind that could trully manage that.. A living one, one that could identify and implement instuctions relivant to each diffent type, if/when it is asked to.
Im not saying this is what there doing, im not saying that intel have a trully AI Chip, but wouldnt it be bloody neat if they did.. Bring on Judgement Day! (For all those Terminator 2 Fans out there)
I wonder who will notice the transmeta page is up first when it does come up, and if it will last long when the slashdot effect hits it
The Reality in which we choose to live in really sucks
"What's with all the tiresome secrecy?"
Obviously if it were that tiresome, nothing would be posted about it. I'm still very interested in knowing what's going on at Transmeta and so are a lot of other people.
Perhaps Transmeta knows this too, and we're their target adience.
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
In the article the author says that transmeta means "Above The Beyond". The prefix -trans- means "across". "meta" Has several possible meaning. That would make the translation vary from "Across The Beyond" to "Across the Goal" and everything in between and beyond.
Just an observation.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Methinks such folk should scale back their expectations a bit. After all its only ones and zeros. Tiny little switches on a hunk of silicon. It will be cool, but not immediately world-changing.
I'm sure we all know that ideas are some of the most valuable commodities in the world-- why else would the slashdot community care so much about privacy? But ideas don't do anything on their own until you have some hardware to prove the idea. Do you really want someone else to take your idea before you prove it empyrically?
The only project that compares in secrecy is the Manhattan Project, and that definatly changed the world. But more importantly, it changed the way we thought.
The Manhattan Project's idea was, "Atoms can be split and produce a lot of energy." What if Transmetta has another very simple yet profound idea? "It's only ones and zeros"? Maybe it's NOT ones and zeros any more. And therein lies the reason for secrecy.
There are two reasons for extreme secrecy. Either you really do have something important to hide (think Manhattan Project) or you want to drum up interest (think GeForce 256). But if you're just drumming up interest, you need to let a few crumbs slip. Transmetta's air-tight secrecy is not worth its cost of implementation if they're not actually hiding anything worthwhile.
In short, I think they're really onto something. It will probably change the way we think about Silicon, ones and zeros, and so on.
-Ted
1. They have bright people working for them AND they don't quit (e.g. no frustrations)
2. They have managed to not give out information, a "company-feature" you only see in companies where the absolutely all the employees believe the product 100%.
3. They wont run out of money...
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
"The future is already here,
it's just not evenly distributed yet"
- William Gibson
>Funded by one of the richest men in the world.
And one of the three major stockholders of Guess Who. Can you say "M*cr*s*ft Linux?"
Switch the letters around of Transmeta: TART AS MEN nuff said.
This post was marked as "Off-Topic" but it's not.
The part about:
- G. Waiting for someone really brave to come out with a general-purpose processor w/ an open architecture that is suitable for high-performance parallel processing so that we have complete control over every pixel and get a consistent, high-quality, fast, innovative graphic experience.
is very "On-Topic", and the complete message just provides the context...
Somebody bump this back up, please!
the fuss about the hype about the hype about Transmeta
Insert mind here.
E-mail some dummy address like thisisatest@transmeta.com and check the bounce message you get.
Their mail server is named "neosilicon.transmeta.com"
That's cool as hell.
Actually, they used to all be bald. That was their original product, the perfect toupee. They only moved on to Warp Drive when the Department of Defense confiscated all of their production models for the "Shatner Turbo 2000" as part of their secret, Super Soldier progam due to debut on Octob$ %$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%
@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!$%$%@#$%@#!
NO CARRIER
Does this
Atleast Linus uses the M$ Window license money for good use. I'd love to trade my useless M$ licenses in for food...
fou aje oym asoyf ueyf jaffaq afset su!6j!/\ op 'ua>|7!>| ppn7
Nothing! And doesn't plan to!
See, you 'allegedly' pour a bunch of money, 'hire' a bunch of famous programmers, and nobody does anything. Tell nobody anything, bake at 375 degrees of buzz, and sell it to someone else for a huge, huge number.
Now, take THAT even LARGER amount of cash, all the developers (who haven't been working anyway) and start ANOTHER company that does what you want to do in the first place, but couldn't afford and didn't want to share with the venture capitol folks, while laughing at the morons who bought the original worthless company on hype.
I only hope that I will not be assassinated for revealing the secret!
Zipwow
(this would be sarcasm)
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
As a designer who worked for Transmeta until last week, I am risking my very life to bring this information to the /. readers.... I can safely say that the primary product shipped will be Warp Coil Drives that will allow man to travel faster than light. Transmeta's secondary product (the one I was involved with) will be Nachos that never go stale...
01101100 01101001 01101110 01110101 01111000 01110010 01110101 01101100 01100101 01110011
Funded by one of the richest men in the world. Only rich people can afford to fund high risk projects. This is probably so high risk it isn't producing anything. Motivation for the top programmers who work there to succeed - None. As Linus once said 'Do you think I would have trouble finding a job?' (or somthing like that). They'll just burn up the VC and move on. I wouldn't mind living that kind of life...
You mean not everyone uses Alpha and SPARC? Wow.. where have I been all these years? :)
~ Kish
I admit, I like the comment about the web page. But seriously, at least they admit they don't have a web page yet. If I wanted to be more secretive, I just would have set the web server to return a permission denied error instead to at least leave some possibility that some IP addresses might actually have access to some goodies on the web site.
"Sometimes the words you are looking for are right on the tip of your tongue. Unfortunately, most people can't see the tip of their tongue." -- Anonymous
dvorak is a moron.
They're developing Reardon Metal and creating superfast trains out of it. D'Anconia is running the place and scamming the mooching VC's out of there money while plotting to fake a disaster. Years later, someone will look through the old Transmeta compound and discover John Galt, the robot, and it will eventually save us all from the looters that have been riding the back of Internet.
I see a book in this someplace.
A quick selection of judicious whoises and nslookups gives us some juicy conspiracy fodder. I employed Sam Gumshoe, my friendly local net detective to hunt down the elusive meaning of TransMeta.
--SAM GUMSHOE SPEAKING--
Why does this company have a T1? (transmeta-T1-gw.mv.best.net) Why does nic.os.org have the following in its home page? What does dmz-net-1.transmeta.com mean? Who else knows polaris.transmeta.com? How does neosilicon.transmeta.com come into the equation? After this search there are more questions than ever. Clearly Transmeta have something to hide, and I, the tireless Sam Gumshoe, am not going to rest until I have hunted down the elusive meaning of TransMeta.Dvorak is the best computer gossip columnist. Period.
Another one. This message is -NOT- offtopic.
It is remotely possible that this person is
violating the NDA he signed with TM. Or maybe he
is talking out of his bungus. Either way, that
seems to be the topic.
Does anyone know if Linus had to sign one of those 'Anything you produce while with this company belongs to us' agreements like the rest of us techies? And if so does that mean that these guys own the Linux Kernel??
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
If Transmeta is really developing some kind of
new processor, and assuming that this processor
will be available sometime within the next
few years, shouldn't they be seeding it to the
development community?? Or they must be at least
writing a compiler for it... (Assuming that
running x86 code on a clockless chip requires
recompiling... wouldn't it?)
What good is a new
processor if you can't run any apps on it?
LL
"If you are falling, dive." -Joseph Campbell
Gosh, it must be difficult to deduce. When posts aren't short & sycophantic (which makes me wonder why you let Katz, who's long & sycophantic, write here) they must be off-topic.
If you rearrange the letters in "Transmeta, Inc", you get "Intranet Scam." Sounds like a good investment.
Other possible letter rearrangements
Martian Scent
Instant Cream
Semantic Rant (sounds like a good name for a band)
Manic Rat Nest
Transient Mac
Men In Scat Art (ugh)
_______
2B1ASK1
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Comment: What Transmeta is working on
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I don't know about you, but I'd shave my head for a chance! Nachos that don't go stale? Make it so!
Transmeta is probably making a very fast, flexible processor. This processor must do two things very well:
1. Run Linux 3 to 10 times faster than any existing processor (at the time of it's release).
2. Provide a virtual machine emulation of the x86 architecture (in microcode) such that it can run windows and windows apps (simultaneously with linux or standalone) at competetive speeds.
As a fallout from #2, it can probably provide fast emulations of any processor, including Java.
If they can deliver this, they are golden.
When intoxicated please refrain from - - Making out with your dog. - Bitch slapping your mother in law. - Posting comments on Slashdot. Thank you for your cooperation.
But Athalon will get AMD nowhere. Intel could cut the price of PIII and still make money in the Xeon. This would instantly vaporize any potential profit by AMD.
Intel had literally the slowest processor on the overall microprossor market in the last 10-15 years of so. The reason they are even alive is because of this whole WinTel duopoly of you rub my balls, I'll rub yours. Imagine what some innovative company with the kind of capital Intel pours into their microprocessor would produce, given the fact that most of the RISC CPUs of the 80's were created on a shoestring budget compared to Intels.
Last I heard, the company has yet to turn a profit. What keeps amazon.com going? I buy from them 'cause they're cheep.If they hike prices to retail levels, I'm gone. Amazon seems caught in a trap.
Hey take your time as long as they taste good with those super nachos your making! I'd like mine medium rare by the way.
;-)
---mind interface!?---
shhhh it's just me I wont tell noone....
Love their web site. Who designed their home page, Magritte?
btw, Dvorak may be well known, but 'well respected'?
These alien corpses take *way* longer to microwave than anyone expected....
Ghod, but it seems like I have been following this story for a long time. With all this hype it seems certain whatever Transmeta comes up with will be something of an anticlimax. But I also expect there will be lots of meat, just perhaps different meat than many hope for.
Still this long buildup of suspense seems almost calculated to create more buzz. Of course Transmeta says differently -- the article quotes Ditzel as saying "It's not a ploy! We're sort of enjoying all the speculation, but we try to ignore things and hope it goes away."
Right. I believe that. Uh huhh.
Still it is beginning to seem like there is a hard core of the faithfull who wait with bated breath, hoping for a silicon messiah to come out of Transmeta and lead us to the promised land where Wintel fades away and Open Source reigns forever. Methinks such folk should scale back their expectations a bit. After all its only ones and zeros. Tiny little switches on a hunk of silicon. I will be cool, but not immediately world-changing.
But, with any luck, My prediction is one hundred percent wrong...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
BTW, I think few people saw this: http://www.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=4614616 79
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
here is proof
It was just a joke. :) Based on the fact that most computers use Intel chips, not Alpha, SPARC, AMD, etc.. Which is why they would have to point out some weird company that has yet to do anything (they cite paranoia over what this company will do, because obviously none of the other ones have done anything yet either, despite having a product). And no, I'm not slamming Transmeta, Alpha, SPARC, or AMD. So just chill. :)
~ Kish
Transmeta is working on a Microprocessor that is able to run x86 code, PPC code, and perhaps a few others, however the key thing is they are developing a new method of doing tasks, fast. Their chips have ALOT microcode (Guess why Linus works there!) to do conversions of x86/ppc to its naitive instruction set. It is rumored to run x86 code better than the IA-64 can. Of course this is all dynamic speculation of my memory.
A story last year (I think) about someone using VHDL to instantly code any CPU without any hardware requirements but a decent sized FPGA? If you think about it, this could be another one of Transmeta's projects.
/. functions as monster.com in its spare time ;)
1. They don't have a fab, but lots of companies make FPGAs. Xilinx and Aldec are two.
2. You could run anyone's code faster than they could. A good VHDL compiler will optimize your code in a way you hadn't considered before. A guy got a VHDL chip to use just 20 cells to detect a 100Hz tone. Unfortunately it was environment sensitve, but still, the results are in.
3. You would need an OS genius like Linus to write a new code set that could take advantage of the fact that you can reprogram the chip on the fly.
Now if you consider these points, if Transmeta isn't doing this or something extremely like it, someone has to be, cause it too good an idea not to.
(And who got rejected by Transmeta but refuses to accept it. I don't think
PassiveRoot
Doesn't one of you geeks have a laser mic?
Or does transmeta not have windows?
If they don't then how about hanging out around transmeta when they go to lunch and then "accidently" go to lunch at the same place they do?
Given enough time they'll eventually talk about something work related.
I _KNOW_ some of you have enough time to do this based on how often you post here.
In the interests of having some clue of what was going on, I did some research that is collected up at My Page On Transmeta.
I took a look at all the "open source" (in the sense of the term as used by the intelligence community) information that I could find via the Internet.
The author of the "Times Digital Edition" sent me email asking about how/why I collected that material...
All I have to say is that people have gotten material of vastly lower quality published in newsstand magazines...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
MEN AT REST... or ARM AT TEN... or SANTA TERM.. or SATAN TERM!!!! They are Satan and they will control all of our xterms!!! oh my god!!!! The world is ending!!!! The bomb will arm at ten!!!! WE WILL ALL BE "AT REST" PERMANENTLY!!!
just some thoughts...
What did Intel have to lose in naming Transmeta as a competitor? Whether Transmeta is a competitor or not... someone, as a part of the anti-trust case, would have needed to check it out.
This possibly put Transmeta in the position of having to either deny that they are a potential competitor to Intel, or confirm that they're working in a similar field.
M@T
'sapientia potestas est'
Naah. It's been done. I'm a longtime stockholder of heyidiot.com and have become a very wealthy man.
I work in sales right now (until I'm done with school and get REAL job) but Transmeta was one of my accounts for a while...and even though I suck at my job, I can get most people to chat about what they do-but NEVER there....They would give me only information about their operating enviroment, but just enough to get a solution in place....
"Most of my heros won't appear on no stamps..." Chuck D from Fight the Power
This message is to announce that Distributed.Net will secret replace the current project with a priority one effort to crack this PGP message. WE MUST KNOW THE SECRET OF TRANSMETA!
There are two reasons for extreme secrecy. Either you really do have something important to hide (think Manhattan Project) or you want to drum up interest (think GeForce 256). But if you're just drumming up interest, you need to let a few crumbs slip. Transmetta's air-tight secrecy is not worth its cost of implementation if they're not actually hiding anything worthwhile.
A third reason might be to prevent being sued off the face of the planet by big hairy competitors. Whether they are on to something or not, a lawsuit would surely distract them ($$$ + time) from development.
A fourth reason might to give themselves some flexibility. Maybe they have a general and basic idea of what they want to make but are not sure if it will work or not. Better to try it out in secret rather than getting everyone's hopes up and looking like fools if it flops or turns out to be infeasible.
I'm sure others can continue coming up with more scenarios....
US05905855 05/18/1999 Method and apparatus for correcting errors in computer systems
US05832205 11/03/1998 Memory controller for a microprocessor for detecting a failure of speculation on the physical nature of a
component being addressed
Don't know about the first one, but these two
could be very useful in massively parallel
systems with a high precentage of defective
processors.
Anyone know any connections between Zyvex
and transmeta?
-- your Web browser is Ronald Reagan
The big idea behind Oxygen hardware is the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). And everyone I've talked to so far has completely failed to explain why in the world FPGAs are non-multiprogrammable - i.e., can only do one thing at a time. The way to do it seems rather simple - out of the whole gate matrix, dedicate a number of cells to one task (say, playing MP3s), and the rest of the cells to the other task (say, networking). Just like we already do with RAM. Lo and behold - parallel multitasking!
If anyone cares to explain why this wouldn't work just as if you were using a regular SMP system, please do.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
we are better trained then the NSA on speed , what we do we know what we dont do we dont talk about.
"darkman" tried a simlar advritising campain and that movie sucked. If they are coming out with a chip we would hear about it at least 8 months before release yet we have heard nothing and thier patents are from years ago. Do the math. Can you sustain a company for 4+ years on 12 million in venture capital? Can you devolp and deploy a chip for 12 mil? *shudder* the mere thought of another darkman...
Seems to me if Microsoft can use Transmeta as an example of a competitor then Microsoft is, in effect, claiming to know something. So... ask somebody with Microsoft what Transmeta is up to!
So, basically, if these chips can do this for all of the major architectures, it would run any of three ports of say, Red Hat Linux? Sounds vaguely similar to being a "Java" of the hardware world. Must be nice.. If all of this speculation actually amounts to something solid when Transmeta finally does "their big thing".
~ Kish