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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

#41

Post by Barbing »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #35
bohrbohra wrote: post #2

All 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.

I worked at Transmeta. I remember for the launch of one of the Crusoe-powered laptops, there was a bug that prevented the BIOS from booting Linux. Since the laptop was only going to run Windows ME, they didn’t fix it. Of course when Linus got a demo unit to play with, the first thing he did was try to install Linux on it. He let everyone know, and the bug was fixed soon there after.

Nice.

Glad you were a part of it at the time?

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

#42

Post by bitwize »

MikeNotThePope wrote: post #35
bohrbohra wrote: post #2

All 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.

I worked at Transmeta. I remember for the launch of one of the Crusoe-powered laptops, there was a bug that prevented the BIOS from booting Linux. Since the laptop was only going to run Windows ME, they didn’t fix it. Of course when Linus got a demo unit to play with, the first thing he did was try to install Linux on it. He let everyone know, and the bug was fixed soon there after.

Back in the day, Linux was less tolerant of incorrect behavior than Windows 9x was, and would crash, terminate a process, or otherwise surface errors at times when Windows 9x would just keep going until the bugs corrupted memory or similar. Having Linus aboard as a technical advisor, soneone to whom you can say "hey, the CPU is crashing here, what's the kernel trying to do at that spot?", alone, probably would have been well worth the money to hire him.

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

#43

Post by dlcarrier »

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.

I don't know about startups, but the Cell processor in the PS3 and the Xenon processor in the Xbox 360 we both fabricated by IBM.

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

#44

Post by noir_lord »

rwmj wrote: post #38
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.

> the pricing was something to behold I guess you mean that not in a good way?

I'd imagine so, IBM are many things (some of them brilliant) but I don't think anyone's ever accused them of been cheap.

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

#45

Post by pizlonator »

pshirshov wrote: post #16
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…

Aren't modern CPUs, essetially, dynamic translators from x86_64 instruction set into internal RISC-like intsruction sets?

Folks like to say that, but that's not what's happening.

The key difference is: what is an instruction set? Is it a Turing-complete thing with branches, calls, etc? Or is it just data flow instructions (math, compares, loads and stores, etc)?

X86 CPUs handle branching in the frontend using speculation. They predict where the branch will go, issue data flow instructions from that branch destination, along with a special "verify that I branched to the right place" instruction, which is basically just the compare portion of the branch. ARM CPUs do the same thing. In both X86 and ARM CPUs, the data flow instructions that the CPU actually executes look different (are lower level, have more registers) than the original instruction set.

This means that there is no need to translate branch destinations. There's never a place in the CPU that has to take a branch destination (an integer address in virtual memory) in your X86 instruction stream and work out what the corresponding branch destination is in the lower-level data flow stream. This is because the data flow stream doesn't branch; it only speculates.

On the other hand, a DBT has to have a story for translating branch destinations, and it does have to target a full instruction set that does have branching.

That said, I don't know what the Transmeta CPUs did. Maybe they had a low-level instruction set that had all sorts of hacks to help the translation layer avoid the problems of branch destination translation.

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

#46

Post by JoshTriplett »

pshirshov wrote: post #16
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…

Aren't modern CPUs, essetially, dynamic translators from x86_64 instruction set into internal RISC-like intsruction sets?

Modern CPUs still translate individual instructions to corresponding micro-ops, and do a bit of optimization with adjacent micro-ops. Transmeta converted whole regions of code at a time, and I think it tried to do higher-level optimizations.

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

#47

Post by dlcarrier »

drob518 wrote: post #15
rsynnott wrote: post #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.

Well, they ended up being mobile-oriented, but even that didn’t work. They were definitely not server-oriented and they really couldn’t compete at desktop. Honestly, while the tech was interesting, it wasn’t really solving a problem that anyone was struggling with.

They probably would have worked well as server processor, because they were pretty energy efficient, but they were slow the first time a program was run, but sped up after caching the translation. Most servers run the same software over and over again, so they could have been competitive.

It would have been an extremely difficult time to enter the market though, because at the time Intel was successfully paying server manufacturers to not offer superior competing products.

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

#49

Post by actionfromafar »

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…

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.

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

#50

Post by mring33621 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #31
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…

> A similar product launch was the Segway, where we went from this incredible vision of everyone on Segways to nobody wanting one. The problem with Segway in Germany was rather the certification for road traffic. Because of the insane red tape involved, the introduction was delayed, and for the same reason nobody thus wanted one.

The children of Segway are still here!

Electric unicycles and Onewheels!

And they're really fun!

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