Positive Reports From Transmeta 77
utopicillusion writes "The register reports : "More cash flowed into Transmeta in the second quarter than it spent, the company said late last week as a teaser for its upcoming results announcement." This is about after a month that CNN predicted that Transmeta was going under. "
Who cares?! Honestly!! (Score:1, Informative)
Face it this company is toast. NeXT even posted a profitable quater once too, and look where they are!
Ok kinda bad example, but unless someone wants their "technology" on a firesale this sucker is in game over territory.
And for all the boo hoo hoo geeks, you are like the fan bois that go on and on about the PPC, MIPS & the Dec Alpha, and yet have never owned one either in their hayday, or afterwards.
Face it the market is only in it for FAST x86, nobody cares about power. And if they did they want to see it from intel, or AMD.
Re:I find this suprising (Score:3, Informative)
You're probably going to battle to find any chips with the name transmeta on next year. However, many other chips may contain licensed technologies in them that will be bringing revenue into transmeta.
That's because they sold their processor business (Score:5, Informative)
transmeta results (Score:2, Informative)
Re:IBM's new chips = Transmeta revival? (Score:3, Informative)
In the case of the xbox/ps3 processors you essentially have to "know your timings". Which isn't a bad thing since from a hardware perspective this gets you more bang per gate.
But to get any sort of high performance out of this the companies are going to have to invest heavily in well optimized libraries to draw from [which is also not a bad thing, but many don't really do this].
So the net effect of a processor [for a single task like gaming] with no ooe/schedulers/etc is if you don't fight the system you end up writing and designing better code that in the long run can pay off [code reuse == time in your pocket].
However, the way to high performance isn't always Ghz. If your cpu runs at 2x the clock but takes 4x the cycles
Tom
I am surprised (Score:3, Informative)
They also sold their remaining Crusoe and 130nm Efficeon CPUs and technology to a Chinese compny, while still retaining the 90nm Efficeon which will probably be manufactured by the new Fujitsu fab in Mie.
Re:Question (Score:3, Informative)
Low power would just be a nice side-effect that would allow the company to remain commercially viable (you got to bring home the bacon. And maybe the lovin'. And the lovin' bacon).
The real benefit Transmeta brings is that after n years of financial viability and R&D research, they'd start selling CPU's and software that would allow you to change your CPU to emulate other popular instruction sets as well... all on the same hardware.
Re:IBM's new chips = Transmeta revival? (Score:4, Informative)
PCs and workstations are more varied. Every CPU revision can throw your instruction timings off and make your tightly compiled code suddenly much slower.
The only CPU I am aware of that is taking a similar approach to Transmeta's offerings is Itanium, which has a few quite neat tricks to get around the standard limitations of VLIW. Itanium bundles all instructions which can be executed in parallel together to allow additional execution units to be added later without and still used by existing code. Transmeta use x86 dynamically translate x86 instruction set code to VLIW code on the fly, so the compiler doesn't need to know about the native VLIW instruction set (not very useful, because it still means they need to do all of the things that VLIW is supposed to eliminate - although perhaps they can just do them once and then cache the results).
Oh, and no one is stripping out branch prediction. With current CPUs, the cost of a branch prediction miss is horrendous (it can be over 200 instructions on a P4, for example), so removing branch prediction would absolutely cripple performance. This is one of the reasons why languages such as Java have high-level syntactic constructs like exceptions - to allow the compiler to provide a hint for the first time past the branch (the exception path is known to be lower probability).
Re:That's because they sold their processor busine (Score:3, Informative)
I *own* one (Score:3, Informative)
Don't know how the chip itself "specs" but I would recommend the actual end product to anyone who doesn't want to lug a brick and an AC adaptor around all day...
Re:What's the lowdown? (Score:3, Informative)
Most of their valuable IP consists of their LongRun2 technology. They have Sony, Fujitsu, and NEC as licensees so far.
Their Crusoe processor has been sold off to a Chinese company, Culture.com Technology Limited. Not sure what the status is of their Efficeon line, but it's been licensed to Culture.com, too. I imagine that Efficeon is up for sale, too.