Torvalds's Former Company Transmeta Acquired and Gone 150
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.
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
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.
Re:Transmeta competed with Intel (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:kinda sad (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Anybody else think that... (Score:5, Insightful)
How ironic.
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.
Re:That's not what took the bloom off RISC (Score:3, Insightful)
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 the fact.
The amazing thing is that a working retirement unit for x86 is even possible. There are so many awful cases. In x86, unlike almost all RISC machines, you're allowed to store into the code you're executing. There's old code that does this. (Does DLL binding still store into code?) You can even store into the instruction just ahead of the one you're executing. Think about what a machine with lookahead has to do to handle that correctly. The old instruction has already been decoded and probably executed before the store of the new one commits. So the whole pipeline system has to shut down and flush, the instruction decoder has to restart, and much work has to be redone. This isn't fast on modern CPUs; it costs like a synchronous exception. But it works. I feel sorry for all those poor guys in the huge rooms of beige cubicles in Santa Clara struggling with this.
A cleaner architecture, like PowerPC, has a simpler retirement unit, which cuts down the design effort, but the pipelines are roughly comparable to those for x86.