Transmeta Up For Sale 112
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 $20 million US every year from 2009 through 2013."
Re:Why is this legal? (Score:2, Insightful)
And then we're even forgetting that they would just use some dirty tricks, like buying all shares or "inheriting" it.
Re:PT (Score:2, Insightful)
It may well be that the fate of all companies is either success or patent trolling. A company in a death spiral pretty much will become a patent troll. Sad.
Re:Why is this legal? (Score:3, Insightful)
What's your logic here? Just plain ol' anti-IP mindset?
Even if they made a law to this effect, then everyone would just set up well protected shell companies for each valuable patent or whatever that they had, and have their real business license the IP from that shell company for peanuts. So if the business crashes and goes under, the shell company can just license to someone else.
And ARM keeps rocking on (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing about the Transmeta buzz that I've never understood here on Slashdot is why almost no-one ever raise the ARM [arm.com] challenge that Transmeta faced. Transmeta wanted to be better than Intel at chips and better than ARM at low power design and their differentiation was....
Bugger all.
A massively over-hyped, post .com bubble company that had a better spin machine than a product line. Now can we all as engineers now formally apologise to ARM for thinking that Transmeta was worthy of being considered competition.
Re:They should put it up on ebay (Score:2, Insightful)
I think they should just do it the price is right way. Have the Intel CEO and the AMD Ceo spin the big wheel and whomever gets closer to 100 million dollars without going over wins!
Re:Since when is Ebay a stock exchange? (Score:5, Insightful)
there's already 3, well-regulated, well-defined places to do it at - The New York Stock Exchange, The Nasdaq Stock Exchange, and the American Stock Exchange.
Are you sure? Have you been watching the news recently?
Re:My 10 Million Dollar Business Plan for Transmet (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1G$ 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.
Re:My 10 Million Dollar Business Plan for Transmet (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
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.