The more I look at Transmeta, the more it seems like one of those great excesses of overblown new-economy hype to me. For starters, the power savings offered by its chip are commendable...if an entire laptop only consisted of its CPU. The CPU accounts for only 20% of the power consumption within a laptop. The rest comes from the display, peripherals, etc. Meanwhile, Transmeta's made no secret out of the fact that in terms of performance, their chips doesn't come close to rivaling those that AMD and Intel offer. For this reason, I think they're considering some sort of technology cross-licensing agreement with the former. It should also be noted that similar power savings could be attained through the use of Ibis' SOI wafers with standard x86 CPUs, all with no degradation in performance.
I think that Transmeta's idea for producing low-cost, low-power chips for portable web pads may have some merit to it, as there could be a decent market for such devices thanks to 3G. However, in terms of volume sales, it'll still pale in comparision to the market for PDAs, let alone handsets. If Transmeta had created a decent, communications-ready CPU for PDAs (something like Qualcomm's MSP1000), or had created a robust CPU design to be integrated into the baseband ASICs and SoCs that go into handsets (in other words, a direct competitor to ARM), then perhaps all the hype that's surrounded them would be justified. There's too many great technological developments going to be fawning over a second-rate, low-cost chip that, in a best-case scenario, will still only dominate a couple of niche markets.
Eric |
