Transmeta Closing Up Shop 413
Ashutosh Lotlikar wrote to mention an article on the Business 2.0 site stating that chip producer Transmeta is going out of business. From the article: "The company's Crusoe family of microprocessors promised lower power consumption and heat generation, enabling the creation of laptops with longer battery life. Critics bashed the chips for being underpowered compared with Intel's latest and greatest. Transmeta struggled to find a market, and recently it sold off most of its chipmaking business for $15 million to Culturecom Holdings, a Hong Kong company better known for publishing comic books."
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
They're still working on putting out a chip based on LongRun2 [transmeta.com], which reduces transistor leakage [semiconduc...ossary.com]. This is very important for cutting power consumption [eetimes.com] and increasing CPU speed. They've also licensed the technology to Fujitsu [transmeta.com], NEC [eweek.com] and Sony [eweek.com], none of which have released a product based on it yet.
It's quite possible, though apparently unlikely, that Transmeta will turn things around and manage to survive. However, Intel is already all over the leakage problem [intel.com], so this may well be the end of Transmeta.
Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes but... (Score:2, Informative)
The Transmeta CPUs do have outstanding virtues (Score:5, Informative)
I will be the first to admit: I was sceptical when Transmeta started publicizing their ideas. I thought employing Linus was just clever PR. Yet, as time went on, I thought a Transmeta-based laptop would be a very desirable item. I hate it when laptops burn your lap, don't you?
Known for selling comics book???? (Score:5, Informative)
I think quite the opposite, because I know Culturecom pretty well.
Culturecom Holdings, under which they've companies sells comics books, publishing press and magazine; they also manage properties, and they also have a technology company, which releases its own Linux distro (China 2k) for use in their line of Linux specific workstation and terminal server selling to China since 1998. Their distro originally released for office use and now porting to embedded system. Buying transmeta's production line is a sensible and wise choice for a proactive technology company devoted to Linux business like Culturecom.
I don't know others, but I feel good to hear that a company devoted to Linux business since boom still around and kicking and decided to enhance their Linux business.
Disclamer: I worked for Culturecom even before they started their Linux business.
This is some sort of social engineering.. (Score:2, Informative)
Here's one little tid bit that will put those of you who invested at ease.. Transmeta is the one doing the design for the Cell processor.. yeah that amazing thing. Yes, for the Sony PS3.
Check back in a year.
Now move along and get a better story to read.
Re:Where can I buy one? (Score:2, Informative)
You can buy these at spectra [spectra.ch]. Look under Mini-ITX motherboards for the MB860.
The board fits into standart ATX-Cases with ATX powersupplies, but is smaller than ATX-Boards and has only one PCI slot. It has sound, ethernet, graphics, usb, serial,parallel onboard.
It is not very fast, but you can work comfortably with it.
But don't expect too much efficiency. It still uses around 30W under full load, including Processor and peripherals. It can work without a fan, but gets real hot then. I run it with one slow Case-Fan (5V in stead of 12V), but no CPU or Powersupplyfan.