AMD Invests $7.5M in Transmeta

trouserless writes with the news that AMD has invested heavily in Transmeta. The power-conscious chip company has been financially ailing of late. AMD is taking payment in stock, binding the two companies (both with suits pending against Intel) together. PC World reports: "Transmeta did secure a few licensing deals, notably in Japan, but it also wracked up heavy losses. In January 2005 the vendor announced job cuts and said it would switch its focus to licensing its power management technology to other companies. Later that year Transmeta agreed to sell its Crusoe chips to Hong Kong company Culturecom Technology Ltd. for $15 million in cash. Last year's deal with AMD, to resell Transmeta chips in Microsoft Corp.'s pay-by-installment PC initiative, raised the vendor's prospects again. But in March Transmeta said it faced delisting from the Nasdaq because its stock price fell below $1 for more than 30 consecutive days."

Re:"Invested heavily"?

[Anonymous Coward]

At a guess, that's probably a month of twos worth of payroll. Most second-round VC financing for an internet startup would produce more than $7.5m. AMD will probably write off more than $7.5m in a year (O.K, maybe not quite that much. Intel would, though)

Don't get your business news from Slashdot, kids.

Incorrect assertion

[Jacques Chester]

TFA says Transmeta shot to prominence due to Crusoe. This is wrong; Transmeta shot to prominence because it hired Linus Torvalds and refused to talk about what it was doing.

Re:The real news...

[TheRaven64]

Their business model failed to take into account the fact that CPUs are not responsible for more than 25% (and usually less than that). If you cut the power consumption of the CPU by 50%, you cut the power consumption of the laptop by 12.5%. Would you pay a premium for 14% more battery life? In practice it was closer to 10%, and sometimes even less.