Transmeta TM8800 And Ultraportable Announced

yerdaddie writes "The just-released Transmeta TM8800 has been integrated into a new ultraportable from Sharp. The smaller 90nm variety clocks and performs better than the older 130nm TM86XX Efficeons. It also seems the Orion Multisystems personal clusters discussed earlier on slashdot will be built around this processor variant. Hopefully Transmeta will be releasing a developer kit soon for eager hardware hackers."

FUD-thought

[repetty]

"Both AMD and Intel have an R&D budget that dwarfs the annual revenue stream of Transmeta. It has had several years of losses [smartmoney.com] and will likely head into bankruptcy by the end of next year."

Intel and AMD stockholders must be wondering what the fuck their company's have been blowing their R&D budgets on.

Smaller companies are almost always way more productive with a buck than big companies. That's why I would withhold publishing their obituary if I were you.

Remember, Apple has been going out of business every year for two decades.

--Richard

Easy

[Erect Horsecock]

Transmetta chips are small so that they can fit into tiny ass enclosures like notebooks, those orion things, and OQOs. If it had to be socketed (instead of a BGA) it would be thicker, the ceramic packaging would be larger and more expensive due to the use of pins...

Etc...

Its a space/size thing... I'm sure they could make one if they wanted but I doubt the demand would be enough to warrant the manufacturing costs (don't forget Transmeta pays TSMC or UMC to make the chips for them).

FWIW