Positive Reports From Transmeta

utopicillusion writes "The register reports : "More cash flowed into Transmeta in the second quarter than it spent, the company said late last week as a teaser for its upcoming results announcement." This is about after a month that CNN predicted that Transmeta was going under. "

Only a single quarter

[TheViciousOverWind]

I'd say it's a bit soon to come to the conclusion that the company is not going under, because of the result of 3 financial months.

I'm not saying that the company IS going under, but it's pretty easy for a company to shuffle expenses off to the next quarter and make it seem like the current quarter is greater than it in fact really is - If we were talking about a complete fiscal year it would be more impressive.

Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Slashdot's love for Transmeta borne purely from the fact that Linus Torvalds used to work for them? My understanding was that they had promised much in the way of low-power, cool-running processors for embedded applications, most of which have been surpassed by better offerings from other vendors. Why all the fuss?

What's the lowdown?

[Illserve]

Can someone in the know fill us in? As I understand it, transmeta's boasting of low power cpus translated into rather meager results in practice.

What's the status of their productline?

Re:Only a single quarter

[Bill Wong]

And, I bet, the only reason they're not in the red last quarter was because they sold off most of it's chipmaking business [slashdot.org].
Fucking ridiculous.

Re:Who cares?! Honestly!!

[jockm]

Face it this company is toast. NeXT even posted a profitable quater once too, and look where they are!

Yeah, all Tom Sawyer like, they got Apple to pay NeXT to take over Apple...

Re:Who cares?! Honestly!!

[brokeninside]

I, for one, never cared about Transmeta because `Linus once worked there.' Transmeta was cool because (1) they were making chips using an innovative design, which is rare, and (2) they were making chips for a niche that I have an active interest in. Turns out that neither their VLIW design nor their approach at x86 emulation turned out to be efficient enough to be effective, but it is tremendously interesting technology.

You're barking up the wrong tree with your point about NeXT. The NeXT crew got purchased by Apple, engineered a takeover, and now control the single largest Unix vendor in the world. Are you suggesting Transmeta might do something similiar?

You're probably correct that ``unless someone wants their "technology" on a firesale this sucker is in game over territory'', but not for any of the reasons you listed. The real reason is simple economics. Transmeta, however an interesting display of technology, failed to deliver a product that is superior to its competition. Which is the sad part. We don't know if their approach is a technical dead end or if their particular implementation of it is a dead end.

You're also dead wrong that ``the market is only in it for FAST x86, nobody cares about power. And if they did they want to see it from intel, or AMD'' as demonstrated by Microsoft dumping x86 for PPC in the XBOX part II and Sony moving to the cell processor for Playstation part III. Not to mention that Via seems to be doing a brisk business with its low-power x86 and ARM doesn't appear to be hurting either.

In one market nich, the desktop PC, you're probably correct. But desktop PCs are a relatively small port of the market for CPUs. When's the last time anyone bought a cell phone or a PDA because of the `Intel Inside' sticker? Who cares whether or not their hardware firewall is running at the latest and greatest high speed Ghz?

Answer: No

[samjam]

No, it's not.

Slashdot's love for transmeta probably springs from the same reason that Linus went to work there:

it was a real cool concept

Along with many others, I was expecting to see a few more uses of code-morphing that x86 instruction execution, so I'm dissapointed there.

Other reasons are Transmeta are not Intel, and like AMD are doing cool stuff and cool prices instead of yesterdays (dull) snacks at yesterdays prices (I would say tomorrowws prices except that prices are going down) that we get from intel.

Sam

Re:Who cares?! Honestly!!

[TheRaven64]

Face it the market is only in it for FAST x86, nobody cares about power.

Have you looked at desktop Vs laptop sales recently? Have you compared the trends? It looks like a large and rapidly growing segment of the market (myself included) cares a whole lot more about power than speed (assuming we've got a GHz or so to play with).

Re:Who cares?! Honestly!!

[LWATCDR]

"Face it the market is only in it for FAST x86, nobody cares about power. And if they did they want to see it from intel, or AMD."

You are insane or an idiot. Right now heat/power usage are huge issues. Apple is going to Intel largley because they could not get G5s to run cool enough for notebooks. Intel is going with Pentium M based cores because of heat vs speed issues with the PIVs. The current computers are more than fast enough for your average home and office use. What people want now are smaller and cheaper machines that do not require a small power plant to run and sound like a 747 on take off. Notebook sales are way up desktops are getting smaller. Even the slashdot crowd are moving away from full towers to mini-itx and shuttle like cases. The only thing you got remotely correct is that AMD and Intel will step up and provide it.