Paul and others, re: Transmeta,
Ever hear of the Christensen effect? It takes place when the technology of a product surpasses the needs of the mainstream. Once that happens, lower-end technologies start to prevail over the leading edge because of other advantages like cost.
We already saw the Christensen effect happen once when AMD went after the sub-$1000 market. For those people, especially those who just care about "You've Got Mail," the leading edge of technology already surpassed their needs. Therefore, they went with lower-end technology (i.e. K6 over Pentium II) because it was cheaper.
Now I think Transmeta is betting on the Christensen effect, except this time, instead of cost, they're betting on power consumption. They're hoping that there are enough customers out there who want their laptops to last eight hours over anything else. They don't care if their laptops run slower than a 400 MHz Pentium II laptop, because all they want to do is run office and Internet applications. So while Intel makes processors that allow high-end laptops to run as fast as desktops (i.e. Speedstep), Transmeta will make processors that allow low-end laptops to run longer than your average laptop.
I think that's the differentiating factor that Transmeta is looking for.
Tenchusatsu
P.S. - I still remember web surfing on my sister's Pentium MMX 266 MHz laptop that I bought her for Christmas over a year ago. I expected that thing to be as slow as molasses, but to my surprise, her laptop performed almost as well as my custom-built Pentium II desktop when it came to the Internet! |
