tero: Any interest in Linus's initiative?
Even though he seems to be an ex Scandinavian, assume there is still some interest in Scandinavia in his brainchildren. Or not?
Curious.
Nokia has already yawned officially, but unofficially?
Chaz
Talk : Communications : The New Qualcomm - a S&P500 company
To: Kayaker (5282 )
From: Ruffian Sunday, Jan 16 2000 7:32PM ET
Reply # of 5292
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Transmeta Corp., one of Silicon Valley's most secretive startup companies, is about
to come out of hiding this week with a new processor for mobile computing devices that sources said has a novel approach
to chip design.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company, which has been as reclusive as author J.D. Salinger since the firm's founding four
years ago, will finally unwrap the mystery surrounding its much-anticipated Crusoe chip at a press conference on
Wednesday in Saratoga, Calif.
Semiconductor industry sources who asked not to be named said that the Crusoe chip represents a fundamental change in
the Internet-based world of computing. The sources, which include industry analysts, said that the Crusoe chip will initially
be aimed at notebook computers and Internet appliances, but it can ultimately be used in cell phones and other devices.
''It's a not-to-be missed event,'' said Mark Edelstone, a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter analyst who follows the semiconductor
industry. ''The information that has leaked out suggests that they are working on some pretty interesting technology.''
The company was founded in 1995 by David Ditzel, who is well known in the semiconductor industry as a key architect of
Sun Microsystems Inc.'s (NasdaqNM:SUNW - news) SPARC processor family and as a former engineer at Bell
Laboratories. He has long been working on chips that use so-called reduced instruction set computing (RISC) technology,
which reduces the complexity of computer chips by using simpler instructions. Sun's SPARC is a RISC processor.
Transmeta is funded by some heavy-hitting investors, including Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - news) co-founder
Paul Allen, billionaire investor George Soros, venture capital firms Institutional Venture Partners, Integral Capital Partners,
Tudor Investments and others. Industry sources said that the company has received more than $100 million in several VC
rounds.
''Everything will be revealed on January 19 both at the product announcement and on the Web site,'' said Ditzel, adding that
he cannot comment on any of the rumors or speculation. Still in stealth mode, Ditzel will not even disclose the number of
employees at Transmeta, which one semiconductor industry executive said is close to 200.
But in the past two years, Transmeta gained even more buzz in Silicon Valley when it became known that Linus Torvalds,
the father of the upstart Linux operating system, had joined. |
