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."

not so fast--

[SolusSD]

$7.5 million is nothing-- but Transmeta's stock is also worth close to nothing... this can only help their stock price. Damn! Should have bought.

Makes sense...

[vigmeister]

Intel's overwhelming mobile computing dominance probably left AMD with no alternative but to buy their way back into competition. It would be interesting if they expanded their GPU/CPU thing to mobile processors sooner because of this. Anyway, this spices things up for the near future given that Transmeta processors branded as AMD will gain better acceptance in the market in general.

Cheers!

I for one...

[CautionaryX]

...am glad that AMD is investing money in Transmeta. Transmeta had some interesting concepts that if applied correctly (without the x86 emulation) would probably revolutionize processors where mobility and power savings count a lot more than all out performance like pocket PCs and really small laptops. I'd bet that it'll work even better on mobile graphics though. Dedicated video cards suck up battery life like a sponge, if the power consumption on those can be greatly reduced when not running visually intense programs... ah the possibilities.

And you thought I'd make one of those overlord comments.

Re:Opteron redux

[TheRaven64]

Intel got a load of Alpha designers too (and a load of PA-RISC architects, who went to work on Itanium). This situation is different. The Alpha was a great architecture, which was killed by management who bet on Itanium. The people leaving Digital/Compaq/HP were those responsible for a chip that had held the performance crown for about a decade. Transmeta doesn't have anything like the same amount of talent. They had some interesting ideas, but not one chip that could really compete in any area (even the low power usage was more hype than reality).