What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
dfarq.homeip.net
What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
1–10 of 156 posts
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#2All I know about Transmeta is that Linus Torvalds moved over from Finland to the USA to work at this startup.
Other than that, it seems to have sunk without a trace.
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#3Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel?
IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) research into dynamic inlining of compiled code, giving performance comparable to profile-guided optimization without the upfront work. It worked similarly to an inlining JIT compiler, except it was working with already compiled code. Very interesting approach and one I think could be generally useful. Imagine if, say, your machine's bootup process was optimized for the hardware you actually have. I'm going off decades old memories here, so the details might be incorrect.
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#4One aspect of Transmeta not mentioned by this article is their "Code Morphing" technique used by the Crusoe and Efficeon processors. This was a low level piece of software similar to a JIT compiler that translated x86 instructions to the processor's native VLIW instruction set.
Similar technology was developed later by Nvidia, which had licensed Transmeta's IP, for the Denver CPU cores used in the HTC Nexus 9 and the Carmel CPU cores in the Magic Leap One. Denver was originally intended to target both ARM and x86 but they had to abandon the x86 support due to patent issues.
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#5> But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms
I'm not sure that that's really correct; they were very desktop-oriented.
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#6Transmeta made a technology bet that dynamic compilation could beat OOO super scalar CPUs in SPEC.
It was wrong, but it was controversial among experts at the time.
I’m glad that they tried it even though it turned out to be wrong. Many of the lessons learned are documented in systems conferences and incorporated into modern designs, ie GPUs.
To me transmeta is a great example of a venture investment. If it would have beaten Intel at SPEC by a margin, it would have dominated the market. Sometimes the only way to get to the bottom of a complex system is to build it.
The same could be said of scaling laws and LLMs. It was theory before Dario, Ilya, OpenAI, et al trained it.
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#7Transmeta made a technology bet that dynamic compilation could beat OOO super scalar CPUs in SPEC. It was wrong, but it was controversial among experts at the time. I’m glad that they tried it even though it turned out to be wrong. Many of the lessons learned are documented in systems conferences and incorporated into modern designs, ie GPUs. To me transmeta is a great example of a venture investment. If it would hav…
I think more about the timing being incorrect - betting on software in an era of exponential hardware growth was unwise (software performance can’t scale that way). The problem is that you need to marry it with a significantly better CPU/architecture because the JIT is about not losing performance while retaining back compat.
However, if you add it onto a better CPU it’s a fine technique to bet on - case in point Apple’s move away from Intel onto homegrown CPUs.
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#8Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel? IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) research into dynamic inlining of compiled code, giving performance comparable to profile-guided optimization without the upfront work. It worked similarly to an inlining JIT compiler, except it was working with already compiled code. Very interesting approach and one…
I remember it being in one of Sony VAIO's product lines called the picturebook, for its small form factor and a swivel webcam.
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#9One aspect of Transmeta not mentioned by this article is their "Code Morphing" technique used by the Crusoe and Efficeon processors. This was a low level piece of software similar to a JIT compiler that translated x86 instructions to the processor's native VLIW instruction set. Similar technology was developed later by Nvidia, which had licensed Transmeta's IP, for the Denver CPU cores used in the HTC Nexus 9 and the…
Very similar approach is used in MCST Elbrus CPUs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S#Supported_operating_...
Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
#10Didn't Transmeta's technology end up in Apple's PowerPC emulator Rosetta, following the switch to Intel? IIRC Transmeta's technology came out of HP (?) research into dynamic inlining of compiled code, giving performance comparable to profile-guided optimization without the upfront work. It worked similarly to an inlining JIT compiler, except it was working with already compiled code. Very interesting approach and one…
Dynamo https://www.cse.iitm.ac.in/~krishna/courses/2022/odd-cs6013/...>?