arcticstoat writes "After giving up on the CPU manufacturing business in 2005, low-power CPU designer Transmeta has announced that it's up for sale. In a statement, the processor company that brought us the mobile Crusoe and Efficeon series of CPUs said that it has 'initiated a process to seek a potential sale of the Company.' The announcement came straight after Transmeta reached a legal agreement with Intel over Transmeta's intellectual property and patents, which includes Intel making a one-off payment of $91.5 million US to Transmeta before the end of this month, as well as annual payments of $20 million US every year from 2009 through 2013."
If you want to sell a company at Auction, there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Seriously, how is selling a company at auction an interesting experiment? They've been doing it for hundreds of years.
there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Are you sure? Have you been watching the news recently?
Uhh, far as I know, this hasn't really been a stock-market scandal. It's been a mortgage industry scandal. Stocks have fallen as a result, but as far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with the stock markets themselves.
I think they should just do it the price is right way. Have the Intel CEO and the AMD Ceo spin the big wheel and whomever gets closer to 100 million dollars without going over wins!
Then maybe it should be illegal to buy the IP of a corporation, but buying corporations themselves is a fundamental system in the capitalistic economy. I don't think it's really easy to outlaw it. And then we're even forgetting that they would just use some dirty tricks, like buying all shares or "inheriting" it.
What's your logic here? Just plain ol' anti-IP mindset?
Even if they made a law to this effect, then everyone would just set up well protected shell companies for each valuable patent or whatever that they had, and have their real business license the IP from that shell company for peanuts. So if the business crashes and goes under, the shell company can just license to someone else.
no, he makes a good point, though in a circuitous manner.
patent laws were originally meant, as most laws should be, for public good.
the patent system gives inventors exclusive rights to patented concepts for a limited time, after which the patent would expire and the invention would be released into public domain. this gives inventors a financial incentive to contribute to the body of human knowledge and encourages innovation. patent holders get to extract profit from their inventions, and society also benefits when the invention becomes public domain.
the patent office isn't just there to enforce existing patents. it's also an archive of expired patents that are now available in the public domain for anyone to use freely.
but copyright and patent law have become so corrupted by industry lobbies that they no longer serve their original purpose. now the only purpose of patents is for corporations to extract profits from patents indefinitely, while keeping patented ideas from ever being released into public domain, and also stifling innovation by anyone who comes up with an idea that is even remotely similar to an existing patent.
There was a lawsuit by the main shareholders that sued the board. Seems the board thought it fine to pay the company council 10 million to settle the lawsuit with Intel. Something that only took 10 months to do. Million a month. Sounds fair to me. Must have worked at Lehman Brothers before this gig.
I have a Fujitsu P2000 with a Transmeta CPU in it and frankly the CPU is nothing special. It runs quite hot and doesn't have any significant power saving settings.
I love the P2000 because of the size, sturdy build, and dual batteries, but I wish I had been able to get the exact same laptop with an Intel CPU instead.
As far as I can remember there was never anything about Transmeta to get excited about. The only hype they ever had going for them was the fact that Linus Torvalds worked for them for a while.
Was highly innovative (i.e., use x86 as a "bytecode" and translate it on the fly into VLIW instructions). Many architects got excited about it, but (sadly) it didn't deliver. In the end, the "classic" out-of-order approach of PII/Opteron won.
In the end it all comes down to two things: a) overall performance + energy consumption. b) manufacturing yield. Even if you do a) right, you still need b). IMO Transmeta didn't have either.
As far as I can remember there was never anything about Transmeta to get excited about.
They did, but as many other companies have found out trying to stay in the crazy process technology race requires huge resources. There
They did, but like many other companies most of their advantages were undone by Intel's superior process technology. They did have some laptops whose battery lifetime was unmatched for a time but today with 9.8W Atoms it requires more to just light up the screen than fuel the processor. It was an interesting run, maybe AMD should buy them up if the price is right but their f
Back before intel got serious about mobile devices, Transmeta looked a lot more promising. IRRC, Transmeta's first chips were available back in 2000 or 2001. The Pentium M was available starting in 2003. Before that time, the only things going in mobile x86 were the increasingly elderly mobile PIIIs, horribly energy hungry PIVs, or the not much better but somewhat cheaper Athlon XPs. All of those options were pretty uninspiring.
Transmeta looks boring in retrospect because Intel has been selling chips with an emphasis on power efficiency for a trifle over five years now, and(with atom and core) low power CPUs can even be had on the desktop, and in bargain basement configurations. Back then, that wasn't the case. Transmeta's fate was pretty much sealed when Intel decided that low power CPUs were a priority; but there was a decent chunk of time before that occurred, during which they were genuinely interesting.
I wish I had been able to get the exact same laptop with an Intel CPU instead.
I also have the same laptop, but I am glad it didn't have an Intel CPU. If you remember back to when that laptop was made, Intel was mainly shipping big, fast, hot chips in the x86 line. If the laptop had been designed using an Intel CPU of the day, it would have been heavier, run even hotter, and had a battery life of about fifteen minutes, even with the extended-life battery. For its time, the Transmeta was the least power-h
They SHOULD have gone places. The owners should have ponied up money to small start-ups based around those chips. It would have been a small amount of money and would have gotten sales moving.
The way I see it, Transmeta was like Via's Cyrix (I own one a Cyrix machine). They were aiming at an interesting market at a time that that market wasn't interesting yet. Their work towards low power, low performance machines was important to get the idea rolling that it was possible.
However, low performance back then was really too low (you still want to watch a dvd or use flash on your cheapass laptop), and it took a few years of Moore's curve to make the concept feasible. By then, Intel could throw imm
I know Nvidia has made some statements saying they aren't looking at the uproc business, but they should seriously buy this company to put them on better footing to compete with Intel and AMD.
I agree that Tilera is making kick ass tech, but Transmeta would give Nvidia x86 compatibility for the existing consumer base. Also keep in mind that Nvidia has stated they believe the CPU will diminish in the home computer while the GPU kicks it up. I don't really agree with that, but if that's their stance then Transmeta is perfect for them. Don't forget that Transmeta has some other really decent patents and Intel would be licensing some of those from Nvidia. Not a bad position for Nvidia at all!
One thing about the Transmeta buzz that I've never understood here on Slashdot is why almost no-one ever raise the ARM [arm.com] challenge that Transmeta faced. Transmeta wanted to be better than Intel at chips and better than ARM at low power design and their differentiation was....
Bugger all.
A massively over-hyped, post.com bubble company that had a better spin machine than a product line. Now can we all as engineers now formally apologise to ARM for thinking that Transmeta was worthy of being considered competition.
Probably because Transmeta's big selling point was x86 compatibility. They never had a particularly credible chance at beating ARM, or MIPS for that matter, in markets where the x86 ISA didn't matter; but that wasn't really their objective.
Transmeta died when Intel went chasing low power design(2003), not when ARM went chasing the laptop/desktop segment(the mysterious future).
To see them go. Their chips always looked interesting but I never got a chance to build a machine with one. Perhaps someone like Nvidia will snap them up? Although personally I'm betting if AMD starts to look like a threat Intel will snatch up Nvidia or Nvidia will snatch up Via. Because the CPU+GPU could turn out to be the right price/performance mix for the laptop/netop business. But if Nvidia wants to get into the integrated CPU+GPU game either the Transmeta Crusoe or the new Via ultra low power chips would probably go great with the new Nvidia Tegra chip. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
This fabless company is slowly but surely making its way into the mobile processor business. It has got enough market cap, has a reputation in the chip business and is not encumbered with heavy acquisitions (yes, i'm referring to AMD). Low-power, efficient mobile chips is exactly what Qualcomm is after as well (see Snapdragon). Lastly, it's business model is also entirely based on patents which makes Transmeta a perfect fit.
Buying Transmeta would give Qualcomm the elbow room needed to jostle into the microprocessor business, and ward off hungry competitors like ST micro.
like Google, Yahoo, IBM, etc, because those Transmeta chips run fast and use as little electricity as possible. It is really needed to create green technology to use less energy and thus stop the coal pollution caused by the Intel, AMD, IBM etc cpus that use too much power and cause the coal burning power plants to burn more coal and thus waste our valuable resources.
Fossil fuels we need to conserve because they are finite and we need to do it as soon as possible to not only get prices down on fossil fuels but also ensure our future by reusing our use.
It does not matter if you believe in global warming, peak oil, or just want to stop using so much foreign oil and foreign fossil fuels and want to stop giving away $700B each year to foreign nations that hate the USA and use our fossil fuel money to fund terrorism and dictatorships that will one day do more wars and 9/11's on us using the money we pay them for fossil fuels today against us in the future. Both liberals and conservatives should be united on this issue and as a bonus it will help fix our economy as well. I'm a libertarian and I want to see everyone agree on this and help bring about greener tech for whatever their personal reasons may be. We need to work as a team on this and stop our infighting as we head into a recession and soon a depression and then when that happens money will be tight and we'll wish we didn't use too many fossil fuels as we'll really need them in the next few decades or so when they are scare or high in price due to shortages.
It's on Slashdot because Linus worked for them. IMHO, TMTA failed because they didn't make their product accessible to geeks like us. I've never heard Linus say anything about it; but it must have been frustrating to see VIA's mini-ITX boards selling in the $300-$500 range, while in the meantime the only way for the average Joe to access TMTA's chip was by purchasing a $1000+ "development system". Even that came only after a very long time. The management had a disruptive idea, but they kept trying to push it through channels. Big mistake. Disruptive ideas have to be put in the hands of people who want to be disruptive. The typical OEM simply wanted to pick the "I won't get fired..." processor, and TMTA's was not it.
Apple got started in the garage because they could buy processors in onesies and twosies at Fry's. That was never possible with TMTA's chips. So sad. If they had allowed geeks to write their own code-morphing firmware, there's not telling what we might have had.
It may well be that the fate of all companies is either success or patent trolling. A company in a death spiral pretty much will become a patent troll. Sad.
x86 is "good enough", and the only way that AMD64 has gotten anywhere is... by providing hardware compatibility to x86. If you could provide a "TILE64" processor with a built-in x86 processor that is worth using, and have motherboards made for that, maybe it could get adopted.
Even Apple is using Intel.
Other processors are used in embedded/cell phones/consoles, but none are making a jump to general computing.
But you omit the reason.... We are stuck with x86 because the dominant platform runs on that. If we had an open source operating system that was popular enough, we could have applications in source form that would compile equally well on ARM, SPARC, MIPS, x86 or AMD64.... Heck, this is the case now for open source operating systems, and the ones causing problems like Flash are.... you guessed it developed for 32-bit Win32 systems.
I omitted the reason because that is even harder to correct, and much harder to work around.
Trying to get every piece of software in an open-source format would be extremely hard to impossible. It would be nice, of course, but realistically isn't going to happen any time soon.
For example, Flash might have stuff licensed from other companies that Adobe can't open-source, so they have to keep it closed. And that is a simple application compared to some very big applications that businesses use.
Trying to get every piece of software in an open-source format would be extremely hard to impossible.
There is nothing preventing you distributing proprietary software as source code. In fact, it would have made a lot more sense if copyright only applied to software distributed with the source code. That would have made the book analogy a lot more compelling.
They should put it up on ebay (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They should put it up on ebay (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, it would be an interesting experiment, to auction it publicly.
And what company is going to pay over $100 million using paypal?
Parent
Re:They should put it up on ebay (Score:5, Funny)
And what company is going to pay over $100 million using paypal?
If they happen to own some subprime securities, the federal government will.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
re:
it would be an interesting experiment, to auction it publicly.
---
they did that years ago. it was an IPO. Made tons of money.
Sorry to see 'em go, but not entirely surprised.
Sell the company in parts (Score:5, Funny)
"You can own this Transmeta chair. Linus might have sat in it."
Parent
Re:Sell the company in parts (Score:5, Funny)
"You can own this Transmeta chair. Linus might have sat in it."
I'LL BUY IT!!!!
- Steve Ballmer.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
ROFL! You, sir, owe me a new monitor & keyboard!
Mod parent up, please!
Since when is Ebay a stock exchange? (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to sell a company at Auction, there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Seriously, how is selling a company at auction an interesting experiment? They've been doing it for hundreds of years.
Parent
Re:Since when is Ebay a stock exchange? (Score:5, Insightful)
there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Are you sure? Have you been watching the news recently?
Parent
Re:Since when is Ebay a stock exchange? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhh, far as I know, this hasn't really been a stock-market scandal. It's been a mortgage industry scandal. Stocks have fallen as a result, but as far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with the stock markets themselves.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Transmeta is not public I believe.. they could sell it on Ebay, but the PayPay fees would kill them.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I think they should just do it the price is right way. Have the Intel CEO and the AMD Ceo spin the big wheel and whomever gets closer to 100 million dollars without going over wins!
Re: (Score:2)
I think AMD should buy it... then they can get paid 20 Million a year by Intel!
Why is this legal? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
And then we're even forgetting that they would just use some dirty tricks, like buying all shares or "inheriting" it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What's your logic here? Just plain ol' anti-IP mindset?
Even if they made a law to this effect, then everyone would just set up well protected shell companies for each valuable patent or whatever that they had, and have their real business license the IP from that shell company for peanuts. So if the business crashes and goes under, the shell company can just license to someone else.
Re:Why is this legal? (Score:5, Insightful)
no, he makes a good point, though in a circuitous manner.
patent laws were originally meant, as most laws should be, for public good.
the patent system gives inventors exclusive rights to patented concepts for a limited time, after which the patent would expire and the invention would be released into public domain. this gives inventors a financial incentive to contribute to the body of human knowledge and encourages innovation. patent holders get to extract profit from their inventions, and society also benefits when the invention becomes public domain.
the patent office isn't just there to enforce existing patents. it's also an archive of expired patents that are now available in the public domain for anyone to use freely.
but copyright and patent law have become so corrupted by industry lobbies that they no longer serve their original purpose. now the only purpose of patents is for corporations to extract profits from patents indefinitely, while keeping patented ideas from ever being released into public domain, and also stifling innovation by anyone who comes up with an idea that is even remotely similar to an existing patent.
Parent
Did they settle the lawsuit? (Score:2)
There was a lawsuit by the main shareholders that sued the board. Seems the board thought it fine to pay the company council 10 million to settle the lawsuit with Intel. Something that only took 10 months to do. Million a month. Sounds fair to me. Must have worked at Lehman Brothers before this gig.
I'll take it! (Score:4, Funny)
As long as they don't mind if I pay them later. How's $19 million a year sound?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I'll give them 500 shares of Lehman Brothers stock and my Star Wars collection.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll give them 500 shares of Lehman Brothers stock and my Star Wars collection.
You'd honestly consider trading you're first run still-in-packaging Boba Fett for a mere multi-million pound business?
Hand your geek card in at the door.
I prefer Hollywood's method for this. (Score:2)
... and the U.S. government is buying! (Score:3, Funny)
How convenient!
If you are pissing away $700 billion, a company like Transmeta costs chump-change.
Why the hell not?
Did they ever have anything worthwhile? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a Fujitsu P2000 with a Transmeta CPU in it and frankly the CPU is nothing special. It runs quite hot and doesn't have any significant power saving settings.
I love the P2000 because of the size, sturdy build, and dual batteries, but I wish I had been able to get the exact same laptop with an Intel CPU instead.
As far as I can remember there was never anything about Transmeta to get excited about. The only hype they ever had going for them was the fact that Linus Torvalds worked for them for a while.
Their micro-architectural approach (Score:4, Informative)
Was highly innovative (i.e., use x86 as a "bytecode" and translate it on the fly into VLIW instructions). Many architects got excited about it, but (sadly) it didn't deliver. In the end, the "classic" out-of-order approach of PII/Opteron won.
In the end it all comes down to two things: a) overall performance + energy consumption. b) manufacturing yield. Even if you do a) right, you still need b). IMO Transmeta didn't have either.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They had the domain crusoe.com, which they bought from a friend of mine for somewhere around $5K. Maybe he can buy it back now.
Re: (Score:2)
As far as I can remember there was never anything about Transmeta to get excited about.
They did, but as many other companies have found out trying to stay in the crazy process technology race requires huge resources. There
They did, but like many other companies most of their advantages were undone by Intel's superior process technology. They did have some laptops whose battery lifetime was unmatched for a time but today with 9.8W Atoms it requires more to just light up the screen than fuel the processor. It was an interesting run, maybe AMD should buy them up if the price is right but their f
Re:Did they ever have anything worthwhile? (Score:4, Informative)
Transmeta looks boring in retrospect because Intel has been selling chips with an emphasis on power efficiency for a trifle over five years now, and(with atom and core) low power CPUs can even be had on the desktop, and in bargain basement configurations. Back then, that wasn't the case. Transmeta's fate was pretty much sealed when Intel decided that low power CPUs were a priority; but there was a decent chunk of time before that occurred, during which they were genuinely interesting.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As I recall, Intel didn't start making power-conscious CPUs until Transmeta showed its hand and started bragging about its power savings.
Intel started doing some work (or paying for technology) and suddenly had competing CPUs for sale.
Re: (Score:2)
I wish I had been able to get the exact same laptop with an Intel CPU instead.
I also have the same laptop, but I am glad it didn't have an Intel CPU. If you remember back to when that laptop was made, Intel was mainly shipping big, fast, hot chips in the x86 line. If the laptop had been designed using an Intel CPU of the day, it would have been heavier, run even hotter, and had a battery life of about fifteen minutes, even with the extended-life battery. For its time, the Transmeta was the least power-h
confused (Score:4, Informative)
Sad thing is (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Nvidia? (Score:5, Interesting)
I know Nvidia has made some statements saying they aren't looking at the uproc business, but they should seriously buy this company to put them on better footing to compete with Intel and AMD.
Here's to hoping Nvidia takes it.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree that Tilera is making kick ass tech, but Transmeta would give Nvidia x86 compatibility for the existing consumer base. Also keep in mind that Nvidia has stated they believe the CPU will diminish in the home computer while the GPU kicks it up. I don't really agree with that, but if that's their stance then Transmeta is perfect for them. Don't forget that Transmeta has some other really decent patents and Intel would be licensing some of those from Nvidia. Not a bad position for Nvidia at all!
Ther
And ARM keeps rocking on (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing about the Transmeta buzz that I've never understood here on Slashdot is why almost no-one ever raise the ARM [arm.com] challenge that Transmeta faced. Transmeta wanted to be better than Intel at chips and better than ARM at low power design and their differentiation was....
Bugger all.
A massively over-hyped, post .com bubble company that had a better spin machine than a product line. Now can we all as engineers now formally apologise to ARM for thinking that Transmeta was worthy of being considered competition.
Re:And ARM keeps rocking on (Score:4, Informative)
Transmeta died when Intel went chasing low power design(2003), not when ARM went chasing the laptop/desktop segment(the mysterious future).
Parent
I for one am sorry (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
"Their chips always looked interesting but I never got a chance to build a machine with one. "
They must not have wanted adopters other than businesses.
Re: (Score:2)
nVidia + VIA = VIA will never be able to manufacture the Nano.
On the otherhand, an effective pact like they did bringing PCIE x16, is happening before your eyes.
ARM on media players, Nano for everything else, nvidia GPUs have a place to be, and more importantly Intel is put back in its place.
Buyers (Score:4, Interesting)
This fabless company is slowly but surely making its way into the mobile processor business. It has got enough market cap, has a reputation in the chip business and is not encumbered with heavy acquisitions (yes, i'm referring to AMD). Low-power, efficient mobile chips is exactly what Qualcomm is after as well (see Snapdragon). Lastly, it's business model is also entirely based on patents which makes Transmeta a perfect fit.
Buying Transmeta would give Qualcomm the elbow room needed to jostle into the microprocessor business, and ward off hungry competitors like ST micro.
I hope someone buys Transmeta (Score:3, Insightful)
like Google, Yahoo, IBM, etc, because those Transmeta chips run fast and use as little electricity as possible. It is really needed to create green technology to use less energy and thus stop the coal pollution caused by the Intel, AMD, IBM etc cpus that use too much power and cause the coal burning power plants to burn more coal and thus waste our valuable resources.
Fossil fuels we need to conserve because they are finite and we need to do it as soon as possible to not only get prices down on fossil fuels but also ensure our future by reusing our use.
It does not matter if you believe in global warming, peak oil, or just want to stop using so much foreign oil and foreign fossil fuels and want to stop giving away $700B each year to foreign nations that hate the USA and use our fossil fuel money to fund terrorism and dictatorships that will one day do more wars and 9/11's on us using the money we pay them for fossil fuels today against us in the future. Both liberals and conservatives should be united on this issue and as a bonus it will help fix our economy as well. I'm a libertarian and I want to see everyone agree on this and help bring about greener tech for whatever their personal reasons may be. We need to work as a team on this and stop our infighting as we head into a recession and soon a depression and then when that happens money will be tight and we'll wish we didn't use too many fossil fuels as we'll really need them in the next few decades or so when they are scare or high in price due to shortages.
Why this is on Slashdot, why TMTA failed (Score:3, Insightful)
It's on Slashdot because Linus worked for them. IMHO, TMTA failed because they didn't make their product accessible to geeks like us. I've never heard Linus say anything about it; but it must have been frustrating to see VIA's mini-ITX boards selling in the $300-$500 range, while in the meantime the only way for the average Joe to access TMTA's chip was by purchasing a $1000+ "development system". Even that came only after a very long time. The management had a disruptive idea, but they kept trying to push it through channels. Big mistake. Disruptive ideas have to be put in the hands of people who want to be disruptive. The typical OEM simply wanted to pick the "I won't get fired..." processor, and TMTA's was not it.
Apple got started in the garage because they could buy processors in onesies and twosies at Fry's. That was never possible with TMTA's chips. So sad. If they had allowed geeks to write their own code-morphing firmware, there's not telling what we might have had.
Re:Don't worry Linus (Score:4, Informative)
Actually he left Transmeta about 5 years ago to work for OSDL which is now the Linux Foundation.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It may well be that the fate of all companies is either success or patent trolling. A company in a death spiral pretty much will become a patent troll. Sad.
Re:My 10 Million Dollar Business Plan for Transmet (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1G$ issue is getting people to use it.
x86 is "good enough", and the only way that AMD64 has gotten anywhere is... by providing hardware compatibility to x86. If you could provide a "TILE64" processor with a built-in x86 processor that is worth using, and have motherboards made for that, maybe it could get adopted.
Even Apple is using Intel.
Other processors are used in embedded/cell phones/consoles, but none are making a jump to general computing.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I omitted the reason because that is even harder to correct, and much harder to work around.
Trying to get every piece of software in an open-source format would be extremely hard to impossible. It would be nice, of course, but realistically isn't going to happen any time soon.
For example, Flash might have stuff licensed from other companies that Adobe can't open-source, so they have to keep it closed. And that is a simple application compared to some very big applications that businesses use.
Also, games are
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Trying to get every piece of software in an open-source format would be extremely hard to impossible.
There is nothing preventing you distributing proprietary software as source code. In fact, it would have made a lot more sense if copyright only applied to software distributed with the source code. That would have made the book analogy a lot more compelling.
Re: (Score:2)
Damn. I was going to offer $1m and keep the rest.