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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

#151

Post by organsnyder »

drob518 wrote: post #149
organsnyder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it wasn’t really solving a problem that anyone was struggling with They did push the envelope on efficiency. My Crusoe-equipped laptop could go six hours on the stock battery (12+ on the extended batteries) back when most laptops struggled to get three.

Yes, but wasn’t most of that because its performance was low? If you had dialed back the performance of an equivalent Pentium (model whatever was current at that time), would it have been in the same power ballpark?

No, there was no way to "dial back" performance in any meaningful way. This was before CPU throttling was really a thing.

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

#152

Post by FullyFunctional »

hinkley wrote: post #102
actionfromafar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone try dynamic recompilation from x86 to x86? Like a JIT taking advantage of the fact that the target ISA is compatible with with the source ISA.

I believe it was HP who accidentally tried this while making an early equivalent of Rosetta to deal with a hardware change on their mainframes and mini computers. They modified it to run same-same translations and they did get notable performance improvements by doing so. I’m pretty sure this experiment happened before Transmeta existed, or when it was still forming. So it ended up being evidence that what they were…

The Dynamo project was the genesis of a similar effort at Sun Microsystems which was the genesis of Transmeta Corp (all founders came from Sun). The question remains if the original study was flawed or if the situation was just too different for our x86 workloads.

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

#153

Post by FullyFunctional »

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…

Backwards. The incompetent Transmeta board picked a VP from NVIDIA to be the CEO and his first action was to kill the IBM contract and move to TSMC, and forced TSMC to use a new unqualified process. This left us without chips to sell for over a year and notebook venders were furious and never returned.

This is what killed Transmeta, not all the technical details.

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

#154

Post by vlovich123 »

musicale wrote: post #142
vlovich123 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And as for Apple itself, they had built the first iPhone on top of ARM to begin with (partially because Intel didn’t see a market). So they were already familiar with ARM before they even started building ARM CPUs As a co-founder of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, Apple had a history with ARM dating back to 1990 at least: > Arm was officially founded as a company in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, which wa…

Yes I’m aware. But ARM from then vs the one that was in phones shares little in terms of useful experience. iPhone is where the partnership became strategically important for Apple.

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

#155

Post by musicale »

vlovich123 wrote: post #154
musicale wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And as for Apple itself, they had built the first iPhone on top of ARM to begin with (partially because Intel didn’t see a market). So they were already familiar with ARM before they even started building ARM CPUs As a co-founder of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, Apple had a history with ARM dating back to 1990 at least: > Arm was officially founded as a company in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd, which wa…

Yes I’m aware. But ARM from then vs the one that was in phones shares little in terms of useful experience. iPhone is where the partnership became strategically important for Apple.

> ARM from then vs the one that was in phones shares little in terms of useful experience

There seems to be a fair amount of continuity.

For example, Acorn's RISC OS (1987 onward) was ported to the modern Raspberry Pi, and you can still write ARM assembly language in your BBC BASIC programs on RISCOS for the Pi.

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

#156

Post by jecel »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #153
jecel wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Backwards. The incompetent Transmeta board picked a VP from NVIDIA to be the CEO and his first action was to kill the IBM contract and move to TSMC, and forced TSMC to use a new unqualified process. This left us without chips to sell for over a year and notebook venders were furious and never returned. This is what killed Transmeta, not all the technical details.

Thank you for correcting me. I don't know where I heard the story I mentioned.
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