Transmeta Up For Sale

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."

They should put it up on ebay

Seriously, it would be an interesting experiment, to auction it publicly.

Re:They should put it up on ebay

Seriously, it would be an interesting experiment, to auction it publicly.

And what company is going to pay over $100 million using paypal?

Re:They should put it up on ebay

And what company is going to pay over $100 million using paypal?

If they happen to own some subprime securities, the federal government will.

Sell the company in parts

ebay is not a bad idea, but sell off some of the physical assets.

"You can own this Transmeta chair. Linus might have sat in it."

Re:Sell the company in parts

"You can own this Transmeta chair. Linus might have sat in it."

I'LL BUY IT!!!!
- Steve Ballmer.

Re:

ROFL! You, sir, owe me a new monitor & keyboard!

Mod parent up, please!

Since when is Ebay a stock exchange?

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.

Re:Since when is Ebay a stock exchange?

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:Since when is Ebay a stock exchange?

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'll take it!

As long as they don't mind if I pay them later. How's $19 million a year sound?

... and the U.S. government is buying!

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?

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

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.

Re:Did they ever have anything worthwhile?

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.

confused

... and this is in YRO why exactly?

Sad thing is

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.

Nvidia?

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.

And ARM keeps rocking on

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

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).

I for one am sorry

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

Buyers

Qualcomm?

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:Don't worry Linus

Actually he left Transmeta about 5 years ago to work for OSDL which is now the Linux Foundation.

Re:

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?

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:My 10 Million Dollar Business Plan for Transmet

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.