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What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

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Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#111

Post by hn_acc1 »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #39
drob518 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the early 1990s, HP had a product called “SoftPC” that was used to emulate x86 on PA-RISC. IIRC, however, this was an OEM product written externally. My recollection of how it worked was similar to what is described in the Dynamo paper. I’m wondering if HP bought the technology and whether Dynamo was a later iteration of it? Essentially, it was a tracing JIT. Regardless, all these ideas ended up morphing into Rose…

That wasn’t an HP product. It was written by Insignia Solutions and ran on multiple platforms. I had it on my Mac LCII in 1992. It barely ran well enough to run older DOS IDEs for college. Later I bought an accelerator (40Mhz 68030) and it ran better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC

IIRC, I had that on my Atari ST as well, and it very slowly booted Dos 3.3 and a few basic programs.. enough for me to use turbo-C or Watcom C to compile a basic .c program to display a .pcx file.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#112

Post by wmf »

jecel wrote: post #100
jpmattia wrote: post #33

> so IBM handled manufacturing of its first-generation CPUs. I'm curious: Is there a consensus on which startup companies achieved success using IBM as a fab? or if not a consensus, I'd settle for anecdotes too. My own company (which built 40G optical transponders) used them back in that era. While the tech was first rate, the pricing was something to behold.

My own memory of the events (which might be very wrong) was that a new vice-president of IBM semiconductors decided to drop bulk CMOS and focus exclusively on SOI (Silicon On Insulator). That suddenly left Transmeta without chips to sell. They had to scramble to find a new supplier and design their next generation processor for it (since the Crusoe wasn't portable to any other fabs). They were able to launch their Ef…

That doesn't make any sense. IBM is the last company that would shut down a fab with no warning, breaking a bunch of contracts.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#113

Post by fajitaforce5 »

nostrademons wrote: post #89
fajitaforce5 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an intel cpu architect when transmeta started making claims. We were baffled by those claims. We were pushing the limit of our pipelines to get incremental gains and they were claiming to beat a dedicated arch on the fly! None of their claims made sense to ANYONE with a shred of cpu arch experience. I think your summary has rose colored lenses, or reflects the layman’s perspective.

I think this is a classic hill-climbing dilemma. If you start in the same place, and one org has worked very hard and spent a lot of money optimizing the system, they will probably come out on top. But if you start in a different place, reimagining the problem from first principles, you may or may not find yourself with a taller hill to climb. Decisions made very early on in your hill-climbing process lock you in to…

That’s revisionist. Transmeta set out to write a software like cpu core. That will always lose to dedicated hardware.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#114

Post by BirAdam »

empw wrote: post #90
fajitaforce5 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an intel cpu architect when transmeta started making claims. We were baffled by those claims. We were pushing the limit of our pipelines to get incremental gains and they were claiming to beat a dedicated arch on the fly! None of their claims made sense to ANYONE with a shred of cpu arch experience. I think your summary has rose colored lenses, or reflects the layman’s perspective.

Wasn't Intel trying to do something similar in Itanium i.e. use software to translate code into VLIW instructions to exploit many parallel execution units? Only they wanted the C++ compiler to do it rather than a dynamic recompiler? At least some people in Intel thought that was a good idea. I wonder if the x86 teams at Intel people were similarly baffled by that.

Itanium wasn’t really focusing on running x86 code. Intel wanted native Itanium software, and x86 execution was a bonus.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#115

Post by bsder »

gdiamos wrote: post #6

Transmeta 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…

> It was wrong, but it was controversial among experts at the time.

Only for those who fail to study history--which means quite a few people.

Fox example, when Intel announced Itanium, the DEC architects (and IBM, I heard later) cheered. They knew Intel was about to dump a ton of money chasing a White Elephant.

Alas, they underestimated the business side and the fact that Itanium, while being a technical disaster, was basically a business success and scared everybody out of the microprocessor business except for IBM.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#116

Post by bobanrocky »

Theodores wrote: post #11

I liked the Transmeta web page from before they launched. It was just bare HTML with no styling. It said: This page is not here yet. The product hype and lack of knowledge about what it was meant that nobody knew what to expect. In these hyped expectations, and with Torvalds on board, everyone expected that everything would be different. But it wasn't. A similar product launch was the Segway, where we went from this…

Network computer - SUN, Not oracle.

Oracle is not a company anyone would associate with engineering innovations!

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#117

Post by vlovich123 »

hinkley wrote: post #97
vlovich123 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 App…

Would TSMC be further along today, or not, if Transmeta had been thought up five, ten years later? Would Transmeta be farther along for having encountered a more mature TSMC? TSMC seems to have made a lot of bones on Arm and Apple’s time.

No, Transmeta was never a big or significant player. ARM was started in 1985 and Apple was an early meaningful investor. By the turn of the millennium ARM was already well established in the microcontroller, PDA and cell phone space (smartphone and feature phone). Ten years later you already had the iPhone well established. It was just never going to happen for them. TSMC made bones on being a fabricator for all sorts of custom chip designs. It almost didn’t matter who it was as long as there was increasing volume.

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#118

Post by choilive »

btilly wrote: post #82
hedgehog wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if the bet was even particularly wrong. If they had done a little better job on performance, capitalized on the pains of Netburst + AMD64 transition, and survived long enough to do integrated 3D graphics and native libraries for Javascript + media decoding it might have worked out fine. That alternate universe might have involved a merger with Imagination when the Kyro was doing poorly and the company ha…

I don't either. Even with their problems, they didn't miss by much. One key factor against them, though, is that they were facing a company whose long-term CEO had written Only The Paranoid Survive . At that point he had moved from being the CEO to the chairman of the board. But Intel had paranoia about possible existential threats baked into its DNA. There is no question that Intel recognized Transmeta as a potentia…

I always found it ironic that Intel benignly neglected the mobile CPU/SoC market and also lost their process lead despite this supposed culture of never underestimating the competition. The paranoid Intel of the 80s/90s is clearly not the one that existed going into the 2000s and 2010's

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#119

Post by carabiner »

fajitaforce5 wrote: post #83
gdiamos wrote: post #6

Transmeta 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 was an intel cpu architect when transmeta started making claims. We were baffled by those claims. We were pushing the limit of our pipelines to get incremental gains and they were claiming to beat a dedicated arch on the fly! None of their claims made sense to ANYONE with a shred of cpu arch experience. I think your summary has rose colored lenses, or reflects the layman’s perspective.

what are you doing now? Retired on a farm?

Re: What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

#120

Post by foobiekr »

fajitaforce5 wrote: post #83
gdiamos wrote: post #6

Transmeta 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 was an intel cpu architect when transmeta started making claims. We were baffled by those claims. We were pushing the limit of our pipelines to get incremental gains and they were claiming to beat a dedicated arch on the fly! None of their claims made sense to ANYONE with a shred of cpu arch experience. I think your summary has rose colored lenses, or reflects the layman’s perspective.

Even the people on comp.arch at the time were baffled. No one believed it.
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