Transmeta

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Transmeta Corporation

logo
legal form Corporation
founding 1995
resolution 2009
Seat Santa Clara , California , USA
management Lester Crudele
Number of employees approx. 90 (2007)
sales approx. 72 million US $ (2005)
Branch Semiconductor industry / intellectual property trade

Transmeta Corporation was an American company that was founded as a processor developer, primarily for notebook processors . After this business model had failed, Transmeta limited itself to trading in licenses for technologies that were developed in connection with its own processors. That was mainly limited to LongRun2 . After the takeover by the Novafora company , Transmeta's business activities ended with the collapse of the parent company in June 2009.

history

Transmeta was founded in March 1995 with the aim of developing CPUs that are as energy-efficient as possible and yet as fast as possible. With the Crusoe, the first processor was presented on January 19, 2000. As a result, the company had major problems finding notebook manufacturers who wanted to install the Crusoe CPUs. The performance and power consumption of the CPUs did not reach the expected distance to the competition either. The faster Crusoe models didn't change that either.

The Efficeon presented in August 2003 , which also took a long time to become available, could no longer save the situation. Transmeta got more and more financial problems and at the beginning of 2005 the first rumors arose that Transmeta would stop manufacturing CPUs or be taken over by a competitor.

On April 1, 2005, Transmeta officially announced that it would focus on the development of future-oriented technologies such as B. LongRun! 2 wants to concentrate and wants to make a profit by selling the corresponding licenses. Production of the Crusoe and the 130 nm Efficeon has been discontinued, but the 90 nm Efficeon is still being produced.

On May 31, 2005, the sale of the Crusoe CPUs to the Hong Kong- based company Culturecom (Culture.com Technology Limited), which had already developed the PowerPC -compatible V-Dragon processor together with IBM , was announced. In addition, the company was granted a license for the production and sale of the Efficeon CPUs. Due to the numerous requirements of the US authorities, which could not be met in a sufficiently short time, the agreement was dissolved again and no deal was concluded.

On June 6, 2006, a contract was signed with AMD for the distribution of Efficeon processors by AMD.

On July 7, 2007, AMD announced it would invest $ 7.5 million in Transmeta. Just two days earlier it was announced that NEC is licensing Transmetas LongRun2 for the NEC M2 smartphone processors.

On August 7, 2008, Nvidia announced that it would acquire the non-exclusive rights to LongRun and LongRun2 for $ 25 million.

On November 17, 2008, Transmeta signed an acquisition agreement with the San Diego- based company Novafora . Video processor maker Novafora was to buy Transmeta for $ 255.6 million. The acquisition was completed on January 28, 2009.

On February 4, 2009, Intellectual Venture Funding LLC took over Transmeta's entire patent portfolio.

In July 2009 the Novafora company went out of business. Former Transmeta employees have been taken over by NVIDIA.

Products

Transmeta Crusoe TM5600.

Most recently, Transmeta primarily offered interested companies the licensing of the LongRun2 technology. The licensees so far include the Japanese companies NEC , Fujitsu , Sony and Toshiba , as well as Nvidia .

The best-known product from Transmeta is still the Crusoe , an energy-saving processor that emulated an Intel x86 and was mainly used in PDAs and subnotebooks . In August 2003, Transmeta's last processor, the Efficeon, appeared .

design

At Transmeta worked greats like Dave Ditzel , Linus Torvalds and Dave D. Taylor (Torvalds left Transmeta in June 2003 to devote himself full-time to the further development of the Linux kernel).

The technology behind the Transmeta processors is quite interesting, even if the end product fell short of expectations in terms of performance. In order to execute x86 code, a software translator must be loaded, which then converts x86 code into instructions for the Transmeta processor. Similar approaches existed in the early 1990s ( WABI for Sun SPARC , FX! 32 for Alpha ), but Transmeta set the bar for compatibility very high: every x86 command from the first boot to the last multimedia instruction works and most of the original performance remains.

Transmeta's approach offers many technical advantages:

  • If the market leaders AMD or Intel expand the x86 instruction set, Transmeta only has to renew the software instead of redesigning the hardware.
  • If errors are discovered in the simulated hardware, they can be eliminated with a software update.
  • Since the processor does not execute the x86 commands in hardware, there is no need to pay attention to backward compatibility. Instead, developers can improve the capabilities of the processor or further optimize energy consumption.
  • In principle, the processor could also emulate other architectures, possibly even at the same time.

These capabilities may explain what was rumored before the Crusoe release that Transmeta was developing a PowerPC / x86 hybrid, which they could have done. In the end it "only" came down to an extremely energy-saving x86 processor.

Processor models

  • Crusoe
    • TM3200 (formerly TM3120)
    • TM5400
    • TM5500
    • TM5600
    • TM5700
    • TM5800
    • TM5900
  • Efficeon
    • TM8300
    • TM8500
    • TM8600
    • TM8620
    • TM8800
    • TM8820

Web links

Commons : Transmeta  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Transmetas processor business before the end (heise.de) . January 5, 2005.
  2. ↑ a b Transmeta with a new business concept (heise.de) . April 1, 2005.
  3. ↑ Transmeta sells Crusoe product line to a Chinese company (heise.de) . May 31, 2005.
  4. ↑ Sale of Crusoe product line burst (heise.de) . February 9, 2006.
  5. ↑ AMD sells Transmeta's Efficeon special processor (heise.de) . June 6, 2006.
  6. ↑ Hope for Transmeta (heise.de) . July 7, 2007
  7. ↑ Nvidia licenses power-saving technology from Transmeta (heise.de) . August 7, 2008
  8. ↑ Transmeta Corporation Agrees to Be Acquired by Novafora, Inc. ( Memento from December 31, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20090128005408/en/Novafora-Completes-Acquisition-Transmeta
  10. ↑ Intellectual Venture Funding LLC press release 2009  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.intelligentventures.com  
  11. ↑ Intellectual Ventures Acquires Transmeta Patent Portfolio ( Memento of March 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  12. ^ Nvidia Hires Former Transmeta Engineers to Develop x86 Microprocessor - Analyst
  13. ^ Transmeta and NEC Electronics Reach Agreement on Strategic Alliance for Low Power and Leakage Management ( Memento of August 31, 2006 in the Internet Archive ). March 25, 2004.
  14. ↑ Transmeta Licenses Advanced Power Management and Transistor Leakage Control Technologies to Fujitsu ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). December 2, 2004.
  15. ↑ Transmeta Licenses Advanced Power Management and Transistor Leakage Control Technologies to Sony ( Memento of February 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). January 24, 2005.
  16. ↑ Transmeta Licenses its LongRun2 Technologies for Low Power and Leakage Management to Toshiba ( Memento of April 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). February 23, 2006.
  17. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of August 10, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) August 7, 2008.
  18. ↑ Linus Torvalds changes from Transmeta to OSDL (heise.de) . June 17, 2003.