Transmeta Needs Microsoft 443
An anonymous reader writes "Faced with dwindling sales, it looks like Transmeta
needs Microsoft's new tablet PC to survive." Or, if not Microsoft, some company who can spark the long-overdue tablet-computing revolution.
Face It (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Face It (Score:5, Funny)
Man, I am so sick of you pro-Sumerian, anti-Hittite Slashdot bigots.
Tablet PC's are a way cool tech (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally don't care WHO makes the damn things, as long as someone makes them, and gets them out there for reasonable prices!
Table PC's are good for medical but what else? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that not many fields really fit that bill. You usually want either total portability or very limited portability (thus making the laptop or PDA a good choice). Furthermore you sacrifice a lot of your ability to do data entry on a tablet PC with only a limited gain in portability. A well designed PDA is actually far superior for data entry because I can use a thumb keyboard and enter data quickly. A tablet requires one hand to hold the thing, and then the other to do data entry.
I've used them and I've found that, for the most part, they are solving a problem that I've never had. I suspect that it's a problem very few people have, so except in a few niche fields tablets aren't going to be a big thing. So buhbye transmeta.
Re:Tablet PC's are a way cool tech (Score:4, Funny)
Microsoft RULES!
Re:Tablet PC's are a way cool tech (Score:3, Interesting)
A niche chip (Score:5, Insightful)
Supply and demand....but where's the demand?
Re:A niche chip (Score:5, Interesting)
Transmeta took the risk in having a very specialized chip--that is...it's very low power but not as fast as others
Actually, they took a different risk. They never thought the performance would suck as much as it does. They thought they could take a very wide core and implement software emulation such that it would be faster than pure hardware solutions by making the software "smarter".
They failed.
Which is really not surprising. It's exactly the same delusion that makes people still think that "compilers are so smart nowadays that they can easily create better assembly code that humans" when that is and always has been patently untrue. People always underestimate the complexity of optimization.
We will never have optimizers as good as humans until we solve the "great question" of human AI. They go hand in hand, but people just don't want to accept that.
Re:A niche chip (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A niche chip (Score:3, Informative)
I only use the command-line compiler and from time to time I look at the assembler output. It's amazing. Proper object oriented C++ design is being translated in assembler that you could only equal by extensive use of macros and other 'tricks' that would make the assembler practically impossible to read/maintain.
The whole trick is knowing how code is generated by the compiler. I remember from the good ole days that Torvalds would do the exact same thing: see what code is generated. This way, after a while, you know instinctively what's the best way to design and write code.
I'm sure there are situations where a human could write better assembler than what's generated by a compiler, but if you are talking anything less trivial than an 'hello world' example, the perceived 'overhead' from a compiler would be required in assembler just as well in order to maintain readable/understandable code and design.
Re:A niche chip (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, what would be fair is if someone took *my* code and compared gcc's output of it with what Rastman might produce in assember. That would be interesting. ;)
Re:A niche chip (Score:3)
I think more fair would be your code in C and your code in assembly. That's usually what your choices are in real life.
Re:A niche chip (Score:5, Interesting)
And you have to consider that all tablet with Pentium III will run at a lower speed when they are on battery.
But it is a Growing Niche (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of humans that can outcode GCC is vanishingly small, and even smaller when you have to do keep track of all sorts of parallel dependencies and such. If I had to guess, I would say their problem is that they don't have the necessary capital to do the software development they would need to make this idea really fly. This seems like more of a research project than a business plan, maybe if they enlisted more support from the community by openning things up GPL style, it might have a chance.
If you are going to make chips, you should concentrate your investment on designing and making the chips, not the software. I'm sure they could do another design cycle in more modern fab technology and get much more speed (or lower power if that is the priority).
Also, my impression is that they aren't sharing a lot of board level IP either. There are lots of applications that are getting StrongArm and other low power processors that would be an ideal market for them, but these are all small companies without a lot of bucks to risk with new designs. OTOH, if you give them a basic design that uses your chips, and sell cheap prototyping parts and support gear, your going to get a lot more inquiries. Would this be enough to turn it around for them? I don't know, but would you bet your company on Billy G. deciding to endorse tablets? Even if they are successful, the danger is that Intel can swoop in and steal the market. You're much better off staying small and concentrating on the emerging niches. Specifically, the embedded market where Linux is already a good fit and doing well.
Too bad, though, it was a good idea, but the timing was bad. They still have some investment money that hasn't been spent, but it would be difficult to change direction now.
Re:A niche chip (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that the scope of the complexity is reaching the point where there's so much to be juggled that the group of people who can succeed is becoming very small, and the wins are so minor except in specialized circumstances, that the time cost vs. speed payoff is just not there anymore.
It's not that a human can't do better, it's that a human can't do better before the product/project has to ship (or, in some cases, remain relevant).
Re:A niche chip (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that is an entirely different delusion. That one is a straw man propogated by amateurs who have taken the effort to learn assembly programming feel "1337" for their arcane knowledge.
For the vast majority of programming tasks, programming in assembly is stupid and wasteful, and the vast majority of programmers will not write better code than their compiler.
Those who can follow something like Abrash's black book, or god forbid, are actually involved compiler research, would laugh at your statement, because they praise the gods that there is such a thing as automation and that it is possible to capture the intelligence of optimization algorithmically. There is a difference in choosing to engage in stategic optimization using assembly and the blind naysaying of deference to the compiler.
In case you haven't noticed, people tend to underestimate the complexity of everything. Even if Transmeta has fallen short of expectations, they failed admirably and still pushed the state of the art. If people listened to the kind of criticism offered by armchair technologist slashbot trools, we'd still be writing assembly code on VAX machines.
Transmeta needs to give up (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello, I'm Linus Torvalds (Score:4, Funny)
Irony (Score:4, Insightful)
Linus was one of the lead software engineers for this company, and yet it needs Microsoft to keep it from flopping? Perhaps MS can do the hardware and Linus the software, which might actually make a good product.
What we need is linux open-sourceness with Microsoft marketing
Re:Irony (Score:3, Interesting)
Transmeta doesn't necessarily need Microsoft to succeed, but they do need some device that will sell millions of units. Right now their best bet is Microsoft's tablet PC. Microsoft is the only player that seems likely to spec a Crusoe in a device and then spend the advertising money that it will take to sell the darn thing.
So far devices that require a low power x86 compatible chip have been few and far between, and when such a chip has been necessary AMD and Intel have had chips that were competitive.
Scary (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:Scary (Score:2)
Transmeta and Tivo are both just too early (Score:2, Interesting)
It makes me pretty nervous; I work for a start up trying to create our own market.
Re:Transmeta and Tivo are both just too early (Score:2)
Tivo is a new idea, something you couldn't do before. Before Tivo, the best you could do was stick an EP cassete in your VCR and program it to record things.
Crusoe is just a clever implementation of the old idea of "low power processor". It doesn't actually let you do anything that you couldn't before, it only provides a different set of engineering tradeoffs (how big a battery you need, what kind of software you can run). From that sense, they aren't really the "early pioneers" of which you speak. Granted, their implementation is quite clever.
That's what I don't understanc about Transmeta. (Score:2)
Re:That's what I don't understanc about Transmeta. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, it would. They need a product that is going to sell hundreds of thousands of units, or even millions of units to make production worthwhile. There's no Linux based product that's even remotely close to that.
Transmeta to create "profit morphing" technology (Score:5, Funny)
They will roll out newly patented "micro profit opcodes" to soak up Microsoft money at the molecular level.
Linus Torvald in bed with MS (Score:2)
Yawn!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
The truth is... (Score:5, Insightful)
The MS Tablet PC could be the best thing to happen to Transmeta. MS isn't exactly happy with the major box brands offering *nix, and inside rumours say debate over whether security should be hardware or software have put a good dent in MS/Intel relations. By going Transmeta, MS can get a good price on a suitable processor (not megapowered like the portable P4's, but perfect for the job), which means more tablets running MS software, they get a bigger say in the design of the tablet, and the poke Intel in the ass and say "Don't push your luck, big guy, we don't need you as much as you want to believe."
And in the end, the result is just as good for open source on the tablet platform, because cheap tablets with a big company behind them will get a strong push into the marketplace, give OpenSource developers a reason to write for the tablet.
I say, Go Transmeta!
(hey, wasn't that a catchphrase from an 80's kids show?)
Re:Nope, Crusoes are underpowered for Tablets (Score:2)
it reminds me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder if that has much to do with the US way of life - we see almost exact same trend in automobile and home appliance industries. People in the States like to drive muscle cars, SUVs, full sized cars, who guzzle gas like crazy. In Europe, the trend is reverse, smaller, more economic cars running on electricity or natural gas and well esablished. Here in the US, they all seem to be either developing very slow or even failing.
Same thing with the dryers and washers. Europe in Japan goes for making them more energy efficient and smaller (due to space constraints, mainly), where here in the US we dont see much of a move away from the full sized washers.
Because of that, I would think the quoted statement could very true.
Re:it reminds me... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really quite simple...
Re:it reminds me... (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance I got a front load washer which ended up costing $400 more than what I could have got a regular washer for. However over five years I should make up for that in water and power savings. (Plus it cleans clothes better and works on my sleeping bags) But front load washers aren't as popular because of that initial cost.
You see the same thing with computers and many other things. For instance with kitchen supplies people will buy the cheap knives and silverwear rather than spending a few extra dollars for something that will last far longer.
I don't know why this is.
Re:it reminds me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:it reminds me... (Score:2)
Not to mention the fact that road trips are hell in little cars. I just have two kids, but there is no way I would go back to travelling with the family in the Civic now that we have a mini-van. The mini-van is easily an order of magnitude more comfortable on long trips, and the extra space means we can bring more gear. And when you live in Idaho, almost all of your trips are long trips.
Re:it reminds me... (Score:2)
U-S-A; U-S-A. (Score:3, Flamebait)
SUVs exist solely to circumvent fuel emissions legislation. The original Nintendo Entertainment System was a fraction of the size everywhere else in the world as it was in the U.S. -- United States consumers didn't like the small one, so Nintendo threw it into a big gray box, and it sold like gangbusters. And, while we're talking about silicon(e), How many tit jobs do you see while walking the streets of Paris? Milan? Tokyo? Lisbon?
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah -- Transmeta. I have no clue why Transmeta's stuff didn't really fly in the states. Someone should do an expensive study.
Re:it reminds me... (Score:2)
Let's see, do I want to do 50 loads of wash, or three... hmmm, tough choice.
Or maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or maybe... (Score:2)
And besides, most Tablet PCs run Intel inside.
Speculate: 3G phones (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Speculate: 3G phones (Score:2)
"Long overdue tablet revolution"-- hype (Score:3, Interesting)
For all the other use, a laptop or a desktop is better.
You can type better(less error) and faster with a keyboard than with writing with a pen, even with the best handwriting recognition software of tomorrow.
The PC industry is desesperately trying to find new ways to sell more PC, so they came up with the tablet PC, but let's not be fooled by the hype..
Some vendors are very clever: they put both a keyboard and a "tactile" screen into their tabletPC so you can have both input mode.
But I think that the early "normal" users after realising that there using 99% of the time the keyboard instead of the pen will think that they are using these tablet PC as some kind of overpriced laptop and will come back to laptop..
I'm reminded of the "thin client" revolution (Score:3, Insightful)
So with tablets we're getting a bulkier PDA (which is therefore not so handy for PDA uses), yet crippled in functionality when compared to a standard laptop, and certainly nowhere near as useful for all-around home and business use as a desktop computer.
Sure, tablets will be handy for vertical market uses. In fact, anyone who works in the shipping industry can tell you that these things have been around for years in more specialized roles. You could even argue that the Newton 2000 was a scaled-down tablet. Too big to be a good PDA, too small to offer much outside of vertical markets.
The PC industry is desperate for something, anything, that can drive sales. So they're dressing up an old notion and calling it "innovation". Think about it. Corporate IT departments won't buy them when they've already invested in laptops. Kids won't want them, because they want game power. Ma and Pa Kettle won't want them because they don't want to write emails in longhand. It's just not gonna fly as a mass-market product.
And why do I need a Transmeta CPU? (Score:2, Interesting)
But how much less power for the entire system does this translate to? I'm not an expert on this, but I'll bet that LCD displays use as much or more power than CPUs. In the end, I don't expect that there is much of an impact on battery life, and thus not much of a selling proposition.
Frankly, I've never understood why this company was funded. For that matter, I still don't understand most of the dot coms, including Amazon and Yahoo. I guess I'm just old and cranky.
What's the appeal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's the appeal? (Score:2)
Transmeta is dying (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Transmeta's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Transmeta faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Transmeta because Transmeta is dying. Things are looking very bad for Transmeta. As many of us are already aware, Transmeta continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Crusoe is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Crusoe managers David Ditzel and Matthew Perry only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Crusoe is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Sony leader Hiroshi states that there are 7000 users of VAIO PictureBook. How many users of Thinkpad are there? Let's see. The number of VAIO versus Thinkpad posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Thinkpad users. Tablet PC posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Thinkpad posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Tablet PCs. A recent article put CASIO at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 CASIO users. This is consistent with the number of CASIO Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of IBM, abysmal sales and so on, the Crusoe Thinkpad went out of business and was taken over by Fujitsu who sell another troubled maker. Now Fujitsu is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Transmeta has steadily declined in market share. Transmeta is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Transmeta is to survive at all it will be among hardware dilettante dabblers. Transmeta continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Transmeta is dead.
Fact: Transmeta is dying.
Re:Transmeta is dying (Score:2, Informative)
If this tablet revolution is so overdue.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The posts in the thread already mention that the Carusoe is a niche chip- from what I've seen, it's gone horrifically under-utilized: a chip that could hypothetically be a power pc, mips, sparc, etceteras is nothing other than a super-low power x86?
A tablet PC might be fine for some people- If the input is pressure sensitive, it would be great for the graphics field- but these really don't seem to be much more than big PDAs or totally integrated, one-piece laptops.
What, exactly, is a tablet good for that a PDA or laptop *isn't* ? I need quick access to photoshop and apache practically everywhere I go (freelance web designer with a powerbook)- a PDA is useless for me, and the tablets I've seen don't run my OS of choice or seem to do anything I might need.
Someone clue me- what market are tablets actually *aimed* at? A laptop is perfect for my needs, and a PDA works great for many people I know.
If people don't need a thing, or can't find a use for it, then the only people that are going to buy the device are gadget hounds- which, in all honesty, don't seem like enough of a market segment to keep a niche industry like this afloat.
Re:If this tablet revolution is so overdue.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, there are a number of markets where ideally a tablet PC would be perfect for. Markets like medicine, the remote sensing industry, or even the university student market. However, I have yet to see a tablet that actually works. I could go on for some time, but a small assortment of complaints include: There is not enough resistance in the way the pen moves over the surface, tablet PC's I have worked with to date do not include pressure sensitivity, and the rendering engine leaves much to be desired along with the navigability of the user interface and the connectivity technology also has not been up to snuff.
Now, all that said, the technology exists to remedy all of these faults. I personally would like to see Apple create a tablet with a cut down version of OS X with it's Quartz/.pdf rendering engine, Bluetooth, and 802.11. Apple is probably the only company around that can actually show folks how to make the tablet concept work and actually did point the way to the current tablets with the Newton some years ago.
Re:If this tablet revolution is so overdue.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Excuse me?!!? Is this a troll? Well, I guess I will bite. Despite Microsofts spending over the years, they STILL have not come to where Apple has been for years. I submit that I used voice recognition back in MacOS 8.1 including the ability for scripting of voice recognition. As far as handwriting recognition, I have a Newton 120 that had much better handwriting recognition than the latest Microsoft Tablet PC prototype that I played with two weeks ago. And I got the Newton 120 back in 1994!
You appear to be buying into Microsoft's marketing dis-information by allowing them to lead you to believe that all the money they spend on R&D makes them true innovators. Did you know that marketing $$'s come out of the Microsoft R&D budget?
Like it or not, if you look at innovation in the personal computing market, Apple has introduced most of the real advances. True they did not invent everything, but they were the first computer company with the balls to integrate many of these technologies. Lets go back to the CD-ROM. Apple was the first computer company to install CD-ROM drives in PC's and paid the price by getting sued by Apple records for their trouble. Do you remember installing big programs like Office before the CD? How about plug and play computing? You only have to look at the NUBUS protocol that eliminated all of the futzing about with DIP switches and such to get say a video card to work in your computer. How about Firewire? USB? The GUI? Drag and Drop software installation? Built in networking? Built in color for the video? Multiple monitor support? I could go on and on here, but I think you get the idea.
As a microsoft shareholder, I am not happy with the way they are doing their accounting and I believe that they are using a large amount of R&D expenditures as tax write offs rather than performing real R&D. Furthermore, this is a company with $40 billion in the bank and they STILL have yet to pay a dividend.
Predatory Pricing (aka Biatch slap) (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the crux of the article, predatory pricing: airline seats, xboxs, OSs, etc. Sell the low-margin product at a loss to sell 5 high-grossing products for an AVERAGE price greater than your competitor. Even if the tablet PCs are a hit, they'll get squeezed when Intel wants that market share. So one foot in the grave at this point
Point missed (Score:3, Insightful)
Transmeta is a relatively small, backbone company and cannot market its products properly this is why they need Microsoft, not because of their <flame>marvellous</flame> operating system. As a slightly on-topic sidenote it seems that though Microsoft used to be about making programs they've shifted towards being about marketing and should anyone ever put them out of the software business I guess they could start making commercials.
Re:Point missed (Score:2, Funny)
tablet pcs, i don't get it. (Score:2)
i could see the value of something like the current ibook, that folded all the way around and looked like a tablet, and enabled with touch sensitivity.
for me, that would be a better solution.
Re:tablet pcs, i don't get it. (Score:2)
just about the only good places of home use for it i can think of are taking it to wc to watch a movie, or taking it to wc to browse.
let's face it, zaurus is great BECAUSE it has keyboard(and powerful and versatile enough to run ssh and others). why would somebody want a bigger product, with inferior features?(oh wait talking about ms...). i can't friggin write on paper the speed of my typing, even on my zaurus and i'v just used zaurus for couple of hours of my live. sure it(table-pc) could be fun as _part_ of laptop, when reading books or long texts & etc, but that's just about it.
Business strategy?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Nuff said, mod me now
Then Transmeta is doomed... (Score:2, Insightful)
Tablet PCs are giant PDAs...or standard notebooks with a touchscreen but no attached keyboard. Either way, they are in a perfect middle ground of maximal uselessness. Yes, many will have a wireless keyboard that can be used, but what's the point? Get a notebook.
Microsoft can't save Transmeta (Score:2)
Transmeta has been relegated to this dwindling, competative market, because they were booted from the more competative dwindling server blade market.
I hope the technology lives on, and a deep pocket buyer can be found that's willing to ride out this economy, but my forcast is that Transmeta folds and there's a fire sale by 3rd quarter next year.
My personal Transmeta anecdote. (Score:4, Interesting)
I asked him who had told him that. He said it was the Sony rep at the store where he bought his Vaio. Uh-oh.
I knew a Transmeta 867MHz processor wouldn't perform as well as an Intel 867MHz processor, but I did some digging and was shocked to figure out how much slower it really is. Check out these benchmarks [tomshardware.com] from Tom's Hardware. The Transmeta 600MHz processor got stomped by a "vintage" PII/366MHz notebook. That's terrible.
To me, small size and battery life rank higher on my list than pure performance. Still, the Transmeta processors run so slowly that the only way I could justify buying one is if they had 5+ hours of battery life. But they don't [sonystyle.com] -- the PictureBook is only advertising 2.5 hours of battery life. Compare this to the (admittedly larger) 3.7-pound IBM X30, where Walter Mossberg put one through the grinder [wsj.com] and got 3 hours and 29 minutes of battery life. IBM is claiming 5+ hours in BatteryMark for the same laptop.
Transmeta did one thing, and that was to get Intel turned on to the fact that consumers want good battery life in notebooks. I think the quote from the article puts it best: "Intel's focus on battery life happened because Transmeta pressured them into it... forced them to do something different. The good news is you've got a giant to acknowledge you but the bad news is you've woken the giant."
Right now, the giant is still stomping Transmeta, and I doubt that tablet PCs will really put Transmeta back in the running. Whatever Transmeta can come up with, Intel has proven that they can match. Transmeta might make initial inroads, just like they did on subnotebooks, but eventually Intel will again wake up, and this time I don't think Transmeta will survive.
Re:My personal Transmeta anecdote. (Score:2)
durr (Score:2, Interesting)
What about Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
Put the gun down! I was only kidding!
Various possibly bad decisions... (Score:3, Insightful)
- Switching from IBM to TSMC before the latter worked out their
Another issue to look at (Score:2)
With a delicate HD in it, the tablet pc really does not deliver much value over a laptop.
Unfortunately, palms are far too low powered (in many aspects), and have far too small screens to be usefull.
Still, given the type of day to day lifestyle I lead, I'd currently choose a well configured asian (since they really have better palmlike devices over there) see http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT8728350077
since its soemthing that I can cary around without treating it like a fragile baby.
I think it went down like this... (Score:2)
Microsoft: I don't know if it can work anymore. These are tuff times baby.
Transmeta: Please, oh Please!
Microsoft: You still with Linux?
Transmeta: Ohh noo I was just using Linux to my advantage, I really love you.
Microsoft: Well, ok. We'll try and make it work.
The Ad (Score:3, Informative)
My compnay has a processor that my friends and I are trying to market. One night, I was tallying up sales on it, when all of a sudden I went berserk, we were losing money, money, money. All of it. And it was a good design! I had...........
My name is Linus Torvald, and I made a deal with the devil.
Buy Microsoft Shares? (Score:2)
Imagine what Microsoft could do if they installed these antennas in large cities, offering MSN 8 and their tablet PC. They could leapfrog many of the broadband provider without having to aquire the "last mile".
Offer the tablet PC with Windows XP, bundling it with MSN 8, and then selling Office XP to all those people.
After all, if the tablet PC thing takes off, it's a new market that Microsoft has to dominate or their whole house of cards falls down.
There will be no point in buying Vivato during the IPO - the shares will go sky high, but what about buying stock in a company down the line, like Microsoft? That's a deal with the devil.
And to make this somewhat on-topic, it could be good for Transmeta if Tablet PCs take off.
thoughts about Transmeta (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Maybe Transmeta should have waited few more years, and jump out with a brand new processor when all other Bigs would be "forced" to build Palladium- CPUs.
Just few thoughts.
consumer psychology (Score:4, Insightful)
My wife did a course on Unix at UC-Berkeley. AOL, PC, MS Office were required for that course. This is the success story of AOL-Intel-MS which managed to sell themselves to a Unix student at UCB. Transmeta is just not big enough to sell themselves in a crowded market all by itself. Linux will not help them. They will need Microsoft support (who else can help them in x86 market). Most likely, even MS will not help them. They will exploit Transmeta to force Intel and AMD to come up with low-cost technology for tablet-pc that they won't to push through consumer's throat.
Where is the "thin client" revolution? (Score:3, Insightful)
That being said, the idea that the "tablet revolution" is long overdue is complete BS. I haven't seen so much hype in at least five years when by now we were all suppose to be using thin client java terminals, and all content would use "push technology." Tablets are going to be great for specialized industrial applications but they are not going to replace laptops. People who think otherwise are the same people who think the Segway will be replacing the bicycle in five years.
Long overdue ??? (Score:3, Insightful)
my brief experience (Score:2)
over due or due at all? (Score:2)
nobody said it but .... (Score:3, Insightful)
If any other company could deliver a really low power display, and a really low power bus/memory then things would be completely different.
If a miracle happens and very low power displays and storage is achived, transmeta could make a real difference. The bad thing is that in this case, probably a low power pentium could also deliver what the consumer wants (ie: if you can have your tablet on for 2 days with pantium and 4 with a crusoe, both good be prety usefull. Who needs the 2 extra days).
They are doomed, they should focus on teaming with whoever is trying to lower power consumption of the other devices, and focus on the flexibility of the crusoe in the meantime.
WHAT Tablet PC revolution?!?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Replying from a Transmeta Tablet running Linux (Score:3, Interesting)
We doan need no steenkin' Microsoft.
I left Transmeta June 2001 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a nifty freaking technology, and it was a LOT of fun to play with. Did you realize that the Crusoe during the launch party was the fastest native picojava bytecode processor in the world? Did you realize that had they exposed an interface to CMS (code morphing software), that someone out there could have written a PowerPC personality for it, allowing it to run both x86 and PPC apps at the same time? Can you imagine what else you could do with access to this incredibly powerful, real-time, back-end compiler? Did you realize that you could decode, issue and retire two integer ops and an MMX or fp op on every cycle, the same decode rate as a modern Athlon and a faster decode rate than the P4? Did you realize that all the tech is in place to allow you to download CMS upgrades that vastly improve performance? Did you know they have a perf monitoring tool that puts vtune to shame? Did you know that using gdb connected as a cross-debugger, you can hit "ctrl-C" in an NMI handler or anywhere else and get a complete dump of the internal processor state, including numerous perf statistics?
Tip of the iceburg for the current core, and their next generation architecture (TM8x00) is SO MUCH COOLER. Like hella-cool with chocolate sauce.
But you probably didn't know any of this because they don't think developers are their #1 customers. Someone there needs to watch Ballmer do his developer dance [msboycott.com].
Crusoe's are cool. Transmeta was cool, too. Working there was like working down the hall from about a dozen John Carmacks. You could walk into any one of these offices and be blown away by what they were working on. They were crossing real-time translation and optimization bridges that Intel won't be getting to in years but will eventually have to face.
Microsoft learned long ago how important developers were. That should have been the main market to chase. Crusoe wasn't ready for the masses, not by a long shot. The performance is catching up with a vengeance with every new core, but they made so many promises and IPO'd on so much hype, that they entered the classic promise debt trap that so many dot-coms fell into, and their lofty marketing plan claiming that benchmarks are "wrong" (please!) and that it offers this brilliant power savings are just goofy.
Had they remained lean, not staffed up to 400+ people from the 150ish they had when I joined, and stayed quiet, humble, and in the service of developers until developers helped propel them to mass marketability, they would not be the laughing stock they are today.
Yes, they hoped to be faster than "native" x86 based computers by morphing to VLIW, but what they didn't realize was that there would be a terrible price in instruction bandwidth. They ended up with a lemon, made lemonade, then added red food coloring and called it wine.
If they exposed an API to CMS, I think they would be truly impressed by the tricks that independent developers could come up with to compress their own instruction stream to make the compression ratio competetive with x86 code footprint.
Do you realize that's really the main performance problem with Crusoe? The instruction bandwidth! On average, x86 instructions, because they're variable width and byte granularity, are 6X smaller than the average Crusoe instruction, which is made up of two or four 32-bit atoms in the current architecture.
OK, that's too darn bad, but it's the youngest surviving newcomer to the x86 market, and this is a solvable problem, and "with many eyeballs, all problems become shallow," once said a bright chap who ought to put his foot down and say it again.
Tablets: I made the demos that ran on tablets for their shows and IPO roadshow. They're cute, fun, no market for them yet, but again, something to get in the hands of developers so that they can make killer apps to create a market for tablets.
Re:Ironic, isn't it? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ironic, isn't it? (Score:3, Funny)
Lets call it "Big Brother Part Deux"
Re:Ironic, isn't it? (Score:2)
Re:Ironic, isn't it? (Score:2)
Re:Aw man... (Score:5, Insightful)
If your business model needs MS, then you're already done.
Yeah, because NO ONE has EVER made a lot of money hitching themselves to the Windows platform... (*cough*Quicken, Visio, Norton, McAfee, Innumerable Games, etc, etc, etc*cough)
Sheesh, dude, get a clue. Microsoft is dominant exactly BECAUSE they make it easy for people to develop for the platform and make lots of money. Review the history of OS/2 to see what happens when you rape the developers.
Re:Aw man... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, because NO ONE has EVER made a lot of money hitching themselves to the Windows platform... (*cough*Quicken, Visio, Norton, McAfee, Innumerable Games, etc, etc, etc*cough)
Look at your list.
Quicken is the only company that has ever competed with MS and won.
If you don't directly compete with ms then they will let you live.
If not, you will die. Example: IBM (in software), Borland, Corel (compare success before and after they purchased WP), WP, Novell, Quarterdeck, Harvard Graphics, Lotus, and the rest.
Re:Aw man... (Score:2)
But it is a whole different matter if you are talking hardware.
Logitech has not been stomped because Microsoft started making mice and keyboards. Because Compaq's PDAs require Windows CE does not mean that Compaq will become history even if MS did come out with their own PDA.
The problem is that tablet PCs in various configurations have been on drawing boards for years. What they have been lacking is a good enough reason for them to exist. In other words do they replace the need for one of the several gizmos that a worker carries or do they provide enough extra benefit to justify carrying one more gizmo. That was, for example, why I gave up carrying my PDA around. It did not have anything that I did not already get from my laptop and cell phone yet could not really replace either.
Re:Aw man... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Aw man... (Score:5, Insightful)
The only resin Quicken exists is b/c MS lets them exist.
Oh man, look at this history of Quicken. Microsoft tried damn hard to kill Quicken. Damn hard. In fact, they were going to just give and buy out Quicken, but the DOJ blocked the buyout.
Don't you think they would just bundle Money with the OS if they wanted to stomp out Quicken?
Sure, if they wanted to screw themselves in the process. The point isn't to destroy Quicken, the point is to maximize profit. And giving away "Money for nothing" (heh) doesn't maximize profit. It's hard to start selling something again after you give it away.
If you think MS plays nice-nice for the benefit of the other company, then think again.
Microsoft is smart enough to realize that the biggest advantage they have is their range of applications. That's why they treat their developers so well.
On top of that, I think MS now owns Viso.
That's called being a successful Windows developer. If only I could create product that Microsoft would want to pay 100s of millions of dollars for. :)
Re:Aw man... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, Microsoft did give away Money 95 (and Outlook 98 for a limited time).
Re:Aw man... (Score:2, Funny)
Does this mean they won't be giving away Chicks For Free either, then?
Re:Aw man... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh man, look at this history of Quicken. Microsoft tried damn hard to kill Quicken. Damn hard. In fact, they were going to just give and buy out Quicken, but the DOJ blocked the buyout.
Yup, in MS' zest to kill Netscape they let Quicken have an icon on the Active Desktop. They also got Quicken to force the installation of IE along side Quicken.
Do they want to kill them or do they like them?
If they really wanted to kill Quicken, they would bundle Money-Lite with the OS and if they really wanted to kill Quicken, they wouldn't have given them a spot on the Active Desktop years ago.
I think they like Quicken
Re:Aw man... (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft tried everything to get rid of Quicken as a competitor, from buying Intuit to those "FREE Microsoft Money" things you saw in stores. (isn't that called dumping, and is illegal?) They failed. Microsoft certainly didn't play "nice-nice" for Intuit's benefit.
Also, I think Microsoft threatened AOL way back when, saying something to the effect of "I can buy you out now, I can buy you out five years from now, or I can go into this business for myself and crush you." Last time I checked, AOL is still doing fine, despite Microsoft's efforts.
Re:Aw man... (Score:3, Funny)
You seem to be under the ludicrous impression that being purchased by Microsoft for outlandish amounts of money is a bad thing...
Re:Aw man... (Score:5, Insightful)
Tell that to Gateway and Dell.
Re:Aw man... (Score:2)
MS doesn't actually make the machines. It's the choice of the companies (like Toshiba) who make the TabletPC's. What they need MS for is to make sure that TabletPC's in general are worthwhile to have.
"They exist because MS lets them exist."
MS lets Transmeta exist? Where'd you conjure up that kind of bizarre logic?
Re:Aw man... (Score:2)
I think microphobia (fear of Microsoft) today is reaching higher than homophobia a few years ago.
Re:Crusoe is NOT slow! (Score:2)
And consider that Intel and AMD can't produce a chip that will stay as cool at the same clock rate. They have at least 4 times the transistor count. You will never see an Oqo style PC with AMD or Intel. Because at top speed you can't switch of your transistors or lower your voltage, if you want to keep up performance.
Re:Crusoe is NOT slow! (Score:2)
Re:Sad thing is... (Score:2)
http://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n6/european_
(only 200 pounds!)