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.
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:It's just business... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 & sub-laptops will continue to grow in coming years, especially as power-efficiency and portability start playing a greater role in people's purchasing decisions.
i mean, if AMD and Intel are both focusing all of their R&D resources on pumping out more processing power, then it makes much more sense for an independent manufacturer to focus on minimizing power consumption & heat like VIA is doing. designing purpose-driven PCs is another way of increasing efficiency and lowering cost & power-consumption. for instance, using specialized GPUs to handle things like 2D graphics (sub-pixel antialiasing, Lanczos resampling, bicubic interpolation, Bézier spline manipulation, high quality image blurring, etc.) you can build a relatively low-power system designed specifically for 2D graphic design.
most people usually only use their computers for a narrow range of applications. if i'm a graphic designer, i don't need a system that can play the latest games; and if i'm a musician or audio engineer, then i don't need a general-purpose PC that can do 2D/3D graphics. by focusing on specialized GPUs/sub-processors and purpose-driven designs rather than trying to out-compete AMD and Intel in high-power general-purpose CPUs, i think an independent manufacturer like VIA stands a good chance of grabbing a large slice of the consumer market.
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.