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Torvalds's Former Company Transmeta Acquired and Gone
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Nov 21, 2008 09:45 AM
from the here's-to-you-mister-robinson dept.
from the here's-to-you-mister-robinson dept.
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.
Related Stories
[+]
Transmeta Webcast Today at Nine PST, Noon EST 345 comments
Almost everybody in the world wrote in with something like "Transmeta's big Crusoe announcement is today, and it'll be Webcast live on ZDTV starting at 9 a.m. PST." Later, after all the hoopla is over, we'll have a follow-up story on the proceedings as viewed through the eyes of several people who are there.
[+]
Hardware: Transmeta Up For Sale 112 comments
arcticstoat writes "After giving up on the CPU manufacturing business in 2005, low-power CPU designer Transmeta has announced that it's up for sale. In a statement, the processor company that brought us the mobile Crusoe and Efficeon series of CPUs said that it has 'initiated a process to seek a potential sale of the Company.' The announcement came straight after Transmeta reached a legal agreement with Intel over Transmeta's intellectual property and patents, which includes Intel making a one-off payment of $91.5 million US to Transmeta before the end of this month, as well as annual payments of $20 million US every year from 2009 through 2013."
[+]
News: Transmeta News
Simon Janes wrote in with the following update
on Transmeta, the mysterious company that nobody
really knows exactly what they are doing, but the names of the people involved are
amazing. Simon writes "Alexander Wolfe's "Wintel Watch"
column
'
Hot x86 chips for '98 and beyond' for
EETIMES
asserts that Transmeta is possibly working on a x86 alternative
for low-power, multimedia, or network computing, or
all of the above.
Wolfe is not ignorant of Transmeta's recent hire of Linus Torvalds and easily sees Linus's importance in the Unix community, giving Transmeta "a big leg up in any effort to design a processor tuned to handle real-world networked applications."
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I refuse to believe.... (Score:3, Funny)
that something Linus worked on was a failure.
You mean he's human after all?
Oh the humanity.
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Worked on?
More like he was hired to sit in an office and be their "star" power.
Re:I refuse to believe.... (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing could be further from the truth. Out of the five major components of the Crusoe firmware -- the dynamic translator, interpreter, nucleus (mini-OS), virtual I/O, and out-of-line handlers ("microcode"), Linus was the driving force, designer and primary implementor of one (the interpreter.) He eventually transitioned into an "advanced research" role, working on more "far out" projects.
You might find this link [uspto.gov] interesting.
Parent
Very telling..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Probably offset against debt.
Re:Very telling..... (Score:5, Informative)
I'll just leave this [lightreading.com] here.
Parent
Re:Very telling..... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
"March 1997, before this community existed" (Score:2)
Whot?
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Pretty sure they're talking about the Slashdot "community" -- Slashdot was founded in Sept 2007.
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Now just wait a minute. Just wait one minute here. Did we have some sort of temporal field anomaly? I could have sworn I was wasting time on Slashdot for years. Guess it's the Alzheimer's again. Or the coffee. Or maybe we can blame it on George Bush...
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As much on slashdot this is self-referential, i.e. "this community" = Slashdot, and if you take this frame of reference "March 1997, before this community existed" is indeed correct [wikipedia.org]:
news getting ahead of itself (Score:2)
The 13th Slashdot story? (Score:5, Funny)
Makes me feel old... oh wait I am. Crap.
kinda sad (Score:2)
it's kinda sad. They tried. But the juggernauts ran them right over. Their technology was gee-whizzy and innovative. But they had a hard job getting anybody to buy into such a radical change.
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"But they had a hard job getting anybody to buy into such a radical change."
They didn't offer any CPU/motherboard combos to leverage Linux community participation, so it is obvious they did not want that. Mobo/CPU combos would have gotten exposure that merely going B2B couldn't buy.
If your product is hardware your community can't buy, you cannot leverage their support very well.
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Not only that, they kept the low-level VLIW (very long instruction word) interface to their chips a secret. I think, especially running Linux, that it would have given them a huge performance boost if you could run native VLIW-compiled code directly on the chip instead of going through the x86 emulation layer.
Re:kinda sad (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
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But they had a hard job getting anybody to buy into such a radical change.
That's not too surprising, due to the disappointing fact that once their product finally hit the market, it wasn't significantly more efficient than its conventional competitors.
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Re:kinda sad (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Did any of us seriously think it was going to work (Score:3, Interesting)
That a small start up could take on Intel in a serious way? Sure you can make processors for some narrowly defined market that Intel might not be interested in pursuing. But at the time (this was before Pentium M and Centrino) Intel's mobile offerings were embarssing, and Intel was hurting to push something out quickly that could solve the mobile problem. Even at that time laptops were consider the wave of the future, and I think we can safely assume that Intel and AMD both realized that the laptop market was only going to grow much larger.
Do you really jump in between Intel and AMD when they are both scrambling to come out with a solution first for a low power mobile chip with good performance? It didn't make sense to me then, and it doesn't make sense looking back on it.
Sorry to be so critical of Transmeta, but I really couldn't see them achieving anything more than Cyrix/VIA with the Crusoe architecture, as novel as it was.
The only thing that I thought might save them from the beating they received from Intel was the Efficeon. Having worked with product development for blades and modules, there are some serious power constraints in many of these products. And if you can get even a few more MIPS per Watt it can make the difference between being able to run an application or not. For application-oriented blades and modules (for example, Cisco NM, AIM and blades) the ability to have a little more oomph means you can offer more connections per blade or more features or do products that you could not do before. (afaik Cisco never used the Efficeon)
Re:Did any of us seriously think it was going to w (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Parent
No, not after the Pentium Pro (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
That's not what took the bloom off RISC (Score:3, Informative)
RISC machines made sense before Intel figured out to make x86 go faster than one instruction per clock.
That's not what made RISC fade into the background.
RISC was about tradeoffs: Do only very simple instructions and you can do them very fast with a small amount of logic (which makes you even faster). Then trade this for occasionally doing several instructions instead of one and you're still ahead.
The smaller machine also means you can move to the next, still faster, logic family while the yeild is still
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No. ... or that superscalar RISC chips don't count as RISC?
The problem is that going superscalar means enormous additional complexity. Pure RISC CPUs are simple; they're just executing the instructions as they come along. Going superscalar means translating the incoming instruction scheme into a different internal format using a different register system and pumping it through a set of pipelines, each doing different things, with a complex "retirement unit" at the end to deal with any conflicts after t
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Also, please back up your claim that a compiler generates worse code than a human. Provide example C code where your assembly is better than what gcc produces at O2.
Well, I was willing to maybe believe that you might know what you were talking about, until this... 'gcc' is a notoriously bad optimizer compared to commercial compilers (especially Intel's compiler). The advantage of 'gcc' is that it's common and portable, not that it's a good optimizer.
Compilers are actually extremely good. I'm pretty sure
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Yes. The web search/advertising market was very young, Yahoo! and MS's search engines sucked, their designs were fundamentally wrong for the direction the web was going, they showed no indication that they were going to make any meaningful changes.
The CPU market was not young, Intel and AMD had decent products, and they were pouring resources into R&D.
Transmeta competed with Intel (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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And is also owned by Intel and produced under the brand name XScale, though rights to the chips have also been sold to other companies.
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Catapostrophic (Score:2)
Linus Torvalds formerly owned a company.
Linus Torvalds' former company was acquired.
What killed Transmeta (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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"morong" at least he can spell correctly. :)
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I loved that too :D
Re:Anybody else think that... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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Re:Anybody else think that... (Score:5, Insightful)
How ironic.
Parent
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Man, that's just so ironic.
:-P
Re:Anybody else think that... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Define "wasted" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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Define "founding fathers".
Linus is a good programmer. There are several good programmers who could write a kernel, specially the kind he wrote.
The GNU project was well underway when he started working with Linux, so he was no needed to found any revolution. Maybe adoption of free software would have been slowed, but things would not be much worse w/o him.
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i'm just curious why VIA hasn't been a major contender in the growing netbook & low power desktop market. haven't low power processors always been their specialty?
i think it'd be hard for any independent manufacturer to compete against AMD & Intel in the high-end market where the duopoly is firmly entrenched. however, many consumers are beginning to realize that they really don't need the latest quad core processor just to check e-mail and surf the web. i expect the trend towards low power desktops