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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

#131

Post by o11c »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #21
p_l wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to the same level. Crusoe was, in many ways, more classic CISC than x86 - except it's microcode was actually doing dynamic translation to internal ISA instead of operating like interpreter in old CISCs. x86 ISA had the funny advantage of being way closer to RISC than "beloved" CISC architectures of old like m68k or VAX. Many common instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchite…

> Many common [x86] instructions translate to single "RISCy" instruction for the internal microarchitecture And then there are read-modify-write instructions, which on modern CPUs need two address-generation μops in addition to the load one, the store one, and the ALU one. So the underlying load-store architecture is very visible. There’s also the part where we’ve trained ourselves out of using the more CISCy parts o…

Even RMW instructions are very RISC compared to what people used to mean by CISC.

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

#132

Post by hedgehog »

choilive wrote: post #118
btilly wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Intel missed mobile, graphics, and AI, while failing to deliver 10nm, and it was all self-inflicted. They didn't understand what was coming. Transmeta was an easily identified threat to Intel's core CPU products so Intel was more likely to pull out all the stops with above-board competing on product as well as IP infringement and tortious interference. Intel had good risk management in having a team working on evolutions of P6, if that hadn't already been a going concern (see also Timna) coming up with a competitive product in the early 2000s would have been much harder.

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

#133

Post by urlgrey »

in 1997 I saw Linus Torvalds speak at UC Berkeley following his move to California to work at Transmeta. I was a computer science undergrad at UC Davis, and took Amtrak to Berkeley along with some friends to see Linus in person. Linux was building momentum, and Linus was a real celebrity to those in the space.

Supporting Linus and the Linux community is a great legacy for Transmeta, even if their products didn't find commercial success.

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

#134

Post by cpgxiii »

vlovich123 wrote: post #98
cpgxiii wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don't think Apple is a good example here. Arm was extremely well-established when Apple began its own phone/tablet CPU designs. By the time Macs began to transition, much of their developer ecosystem was already familiar. Apple's CPUs are actually notably conservative when com…

I think your focusing on the details and missing my broader point - the JIT technique for translation only works to break out of the instruction set lock-in. It does not improve performance, so betting on that instead of super scalar designs is not wise. Transmeta’s CPU was not performance competitive and thus had no path to success. And as for Apple itself, they had built the first iPhone on top of ARM to begin with…

> I think you're focusing on the details and missing my broader point - the JIT technique for translation only works to break out of the instruction set lock-in. It does not improve performance, so betting on that instead of super scalar designs is not wise.

> Transmeta’s CPU was not performance competitive and thus had no path to success.

I think you are operating with a bit too much benefit from hindsight. In a very reductive sense, every time someone has tried to make dynamic ISA translation work, they have done so because they believe their ability to implement their "real" ISA will be superior in some way than their ability to implement the external ISA. Obviously many have failed at this, usually when trying more ambitious designs, but less ambitious designs (perhaps most famously the AMD K5 and its descendants) have succeeded.

Apple's case is really quite different, in that unlike Transmeta or Nvidia, they already had several generations of CPU implementations on which to base their decisions prior to the point of announcing the macOS x64->arm64 transition, just as they had several generations of Intel hardware to consider when making the PPC->x86 transition.

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

#135

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

onecommentman wrote: post #128
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the point that Google's "bunch of cheap computers" was new It wasn't even new, people just don't know the history. Inktomi and HotBot were based on a fleet of commodity PC servers with low reliability, whereas other large web properties of the time were buying big iron like Sun E10K. And of course Beowulf clusters were a thing. And as far as I know, google's early ethos didn't come as some far sighted strategy,…

The “bunch of cheap computers” approach was being studied and implemented at the National Labs years before Google showed up. Revisionist history?

Not revisionist I think just more that a lot of people first encountered the concept with the story of Google and don't know it had plenty of precedent.

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

#136

Post by BennyGezerit »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #54

More interestingly, whatever happened to David "Pardo" Keppel, who PhD thesis and person were somewhat central to Transmeta (at least as far as I remember it). For someone who was doing a CS PhD in the mid 90s, he has a vanishingly tiny online footprint. Not sure if that is inspiring or concerning ...

He's at Intel, I believe. I found his name on some Intel patents from 2021 or so (I worked with him at Transmeta)

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

#137

Post by carabiner »

onecommentman wrote: post #129
carabiner wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what are you doing now? Retired on a farm?

We’re all retired in some sense. Some on farms, some elsewhere. But in a broader and deeper and more meaningful level, we’re not retired at all…working harder than ever.

I don't think I am retired in any sense.

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

#140

Post by tyingq »

sgerenser wrote: post #81
tyingq wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://web.archive.org/web/19970710102251/http://www.transm... Then, https://web.archive.org/web/20000229173916/http://www.transm... , when content appeared around Feb 2000. Product launch PDF from Jan 19, 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20000815231116/http://www.transm...

It looks like rather than hiring a designer, they let one of their engineers (or worse, the CEO) design the Transmeta logo. I don’t know what that font is, but it might be even worse than Papyrus.

Amplia Pro, maybe.

https://www.myfonts.com/collections/amplia-pro-font-jonahfon...

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