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."
Why is this legal? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:I'll take it! (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.
Sad thing is (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Did they ever have anything worthwhile? (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.
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.
Re:Did they ever have anything worthwhile? (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:My 10 Million Dollar Business Plan for Transmet (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.