Transmeta suffers hype and hardware reality

Perhaps the decision to name its flagship product after a fictional shipwrecked traveler who spent almost 30 years trapped on a small island was not the best of omens for Transmeta Corp.

The company debuted in 2000 with Crusoe, a new chip with a low-power software-based approach to processing instructions. But four years later, Transmeta has racked up US$591 million in losses and watched its Silicon Valley neighbor, Intel Corp., claim all the spoils from an industrywide move toward low-power mobile processors. Transmeta warned investors in its most recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month that the company might be forced to scale back operations to concentrate on its fledgling licensing business if it needs to raise cash in future quarters and runs into problems securing credit.

Perhaps it's a little early to put the nail in the coffin of a company that many in the chip industry wrote off several years ago, but Transmeta is at a perilous stage as Intel continues to dominate the notebook processors market. The Santa Clara, California, company's chances of building on the momentum generated by a well-covered company launch event have run smack into the formidable barriers to entry in the market for PC processors.

In the five years before Transmeta was formally announced in January 2000, press and analysts were told little about what was going on inside the company. They knew its goal was to develop a next-generation mobile processor and its staff included technology luminaries such as Linux developer Linus Torvalds and Bell Laboratories processor designer David Ditzel. When Crusoe was finally unveiled, the PC industry had a chance to peek behind the curtain.

Crusoe's main benefit, and main problem, was its code-morphing software. Transmeta used a 128-bit VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture to build Crusoe, but that architecture was not compatible with the x86 architecture used by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (AMD's) processors and the vast majority of the world's PC software. So software was used to translate x86 instructions to Transmeta's hardware.

This approach allowed Transmeta to use fewer transistors on Crusoe than most x86 chips, cutting the chip's power consumption. The company recognized early that mobile processors needed to consume a lot less power if mobile computing devices were to take over the PC market.

An additional power-saving software technology called LongRun allowed Crusoe to adjust its clock speed thousands of times a second in sync with the processing requirements of an application. The company promised that users fed up with short battery life would have a better experience with a Crusoe system.

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