Transmeta leaving the x86 processor business?

[K. Eng]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=22266

I'm sort of disappointed. I remember reading about TMTA back in late 1999 and thinking that their Crusoe chip would be great for notebooks. And then I remember reading the benchmarks in 2000 and being underwhelmed. The battery life of Crusoe (and later Efficeon) CPUs was mediocre at best and the battery life was marginally better than Pentium III notebooks, and about the same as Centrino notebooks.

Hopefully TMTA will continue to contribute to low power technologies.

[anthean]

I agree, I had hoped Transmeta would see at least surviveable success. Competition is good for us consumers.

In fact, Intel may owe quite a bit (although perhaps not its survival) to Transmeta. While some suggest that Intel just naturally realized that the P4 was not a good mobile chip (if this occurred around 2000 it was a rather late realization), I believe in fact the threat posed by the low power Transmeta Crusoe pushed Intel to develop the Pentium M.

With the P4 now hitting a brick wall with respect to speed, and with Itanium receiving less than fantastic acceptance, the Pentium M is Intel's single current success.

Intel's longer range plans may also depend on a further development of the Pentium M (Merom with versions for both mobile and desktop).

[Batuta]

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[K. Eng]

Flexibility and simpler hardware. I remember reading that moving a lot of the x86 compatibility into software reduced the number of transistors needed in the actual execution core (fewer transistors supposedly meant less power consumption). Of course the software overhead essentially negated any performance advantages the hardware might have had.

I'm neither disappointed nor surprised.
Their original claim was flexibillity. They said they could emulate every chip out there. But since we (almost) all live in an Intel world anyway, what's the use of such an emulator?
It would have been much better if they'd just decided to compete in the x86 world and gone the way AMD did.
Try to invent another Pentium, better than the Pentium.
Not to original, not very fancy, but still a money maker.

[Batuta]

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