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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (87622)	1/17/2000 3:53:00 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572372

Martin's comments on their own merit are quite correct and astute: there indeed are different requirements between these markets. Additionally, Intel (currently) does appear to have a slight weak spot in the STB, etc. markets. Which isn't to say I have an opinion on Transmeta - in fact, I will reserve opinion on Transmeta until I get the facts. But I am definitely acknowledging a market situation which (currently) exists. Whether this situation is exploited or not, remains to be seen. Also, what Intel's response is, remains to be seen. History has shown, if the market is large enough, Intel responds aggressively. Until then, there's a potential opportunity for some tailoring to these markets. Who does it, remains to be seen. Amy J Do you know if that's the intent of Transmeta...to market their chip for multimedia purposes? ted

To: Amy J who wrote (87622)	1/17/2000 1:59:00 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572372

Amy & thread, a potential weakness of Transmeta design is the unpredictability of its execution speed. For embedded applications, you may want a guarantee that a given task can be performed within a certain deadline. The Transmeta thingy first has to translate code into its native instruction set before running it. Therefore, the first time any segment of code is executed, or any time the translation is not still in the Translation Cache, the code will run much slower. We'll have to wait for the disclosure to see what Transmeta may have done to avoid this weakness. As for it using only one watt, IDT makes MIPS clones that use less than a watt of power and I believe versions of Intel's Strongarm are in that ballpark. I hope the Transmeta disclosure is early on Wednesday so as not to steal the thunder from AMD's earnings & conference call. Petz