Thread,
You have to wonder if this all all hype, part hype and part reality, or a significant new competitor. I guess we will get part of the answer on Wednesday:
Silicon Valley's Transmeta Coming Out of Hiding
By Therese Poletti
Sunday January 16 4:01 PM ET
SAN FRANCISCO (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.
The company seems to have had some fun in its top-secret mode, burying what it calls a secret message under the document source section of its Web site. Its Web site, which was updated in November, features a picture of a blue sea and horizon, with footprints in the sand, a likely reference to Daniel Defoe's shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe.
''Yes, there is a secret message, and this is it: Transmeta's policy has been to remain silent about its plans until it had something to demonstrate to the world...Crusoe will be cool hardware and software for mobile applications. Crusoe will be unconventional,' reads the hidden message at www.transmeta.com.
Torvalds' employment at Transmeta has fueled speculation that the Crusoe processor will power devices running Linux, which is becoming an alternative to Windows for some computing applications, such running e-mail and Web site servers.
''You don't need Linus to do a Linux port,' said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at the Linley Report in Mountain View, Calif. A port refers to software converted to run in a different computer environment.
Gwennap said he believes Torvalds was hired by Ditzel because he is a renowned programr and that his expertise was necessary to work on Transmeta's complex product designs, which place much of the chip's functions in the software instead of the hardware. But Linux is believed to be an important part of the strategy.
Transmeta has developed very low power-consuming chips that are capable of mimicking any processor architecture, and sources and analysts said they believed the company has focused on Intel Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:INTC - news) widely-used x86 processor architecture. This means that any standard PC application would be able to run on Crusoe-powered notebooks and other Net appliances and devices.
The company has received two U.S. patents in the past year, one for a ''code-morphing' technique, which basically lets the processor act like a chameleon, translating the instructions from any kind of chip architecture (such as Intel's x86 instructions) into Crusoe chip instructions.
Transmeta is also believed to have designed a so-called VLIW (very long instruction word) engine, which improves performance and saves power. A processor using VLIW architecture organizes all the computer's instructions ahead of time, so they are lined up in parallel and ready to go, boosting performance. Standard chip architectures go back and forth, checking and fetching instructions, using up battery power in mobile systems.
''A mobile Intel chip uses 10-15 watts of electricity,' said Gwennap. ''I've heard that Transmeta's uses one to two watts.' But he also noted that he has heard that the complex code-morphing technology may slow the processor's performance down.
Not to be outdone, on Tuesday Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel is coming out with faster Pentium III processors targeted to the notebook market, with a new technology called SpeedStep that improves enables the same level of performance in a notebook as on a desktop PC and improvements to preserve the battery life.
Transmeta is not expected to manufacture the Crusoe processor but is expected to contract out its manufacturing. Last week, the Financial Times reported that Transmeta has signed a pact with International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) for its chips. A spokesman for IBM could not be immediately reached for comment.
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