Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: redrumloa on March 16, 2005, 06:16:17 PM
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HERE (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=TMTA&t=5y)
Transmeta is now trading as a penny stock, a long was from it's $50+ back in 2000. The question is, can there be any other outcome other than death at this point?
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Pity, someone should have told them about the Amiga curse before it was too late. With it being at $1 @ share, I wonder who's going to buy it out for IP rights.
Dammy
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What was Transmeta?
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With it being at $1 @ share, I wonder who's going to buy it out for IP rights.
KMOS ?
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http://www.transmeta.com/
Transmeta Corporation designs, develops and sells x86-compatible software-based microprocessors. The Company's microprocessors have applications in a range of computing platforms, especially battery-operated mobile devices and applications that need high performance, low power consumption and low heat generation. Such platforms include notebook computers, ultra-personal computers (UPCs), tablet personal computers (PCs), thin clients, blade servers and embedded computers. In 2003, its top four customers were Sharp, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and one of its distributors, Uniquest, acting as the distributor of its product for the Hewlett Packard Tablet PC program. Transmeta's primary products include the Efficeon TM8000 family of microprocessors and the TM5000 family of Crusoe microprocessors.
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Since their hook is low power at modest speeds, I think they are fighting a loosing battle against Via with the Eden platfrom.
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Since their hook is low power at modest speeds, I think they are fighting a loosing battle against Via with the Eden platfrom.
Well, when they started they were talking about a CPU that could be used / programmed to execute I386 or PPC or Alpha or whatever instruction set you wanted.. That's I believe was the main reason for Transmeta to be considered a partner..
(That's IIRC tho)
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It's possible to come back. May not be common, but it's happened before. One of my employers was trading under a dollar (around $0.70 or so) for a while a few years ago, but they're currently just above $3.00, and between then and now they had been up just over $7.00 about a year ago.
Many expect a downturn in the chip industry this year, supposedly we're entering the an expected low point of a 30 year cycle or something. I thought the last 5 years or so was the lowpoint, but guess it's not over yet and moving back up again is nowhere in sight. Could be a bad omen for Transmeta in that current state. They might turn out lucky. Hard to say really until it's either over or they find a way to prosper again, but with Intel spending much more effort on low-poer than they did 5 years ago, Transmeta may have to largely reinvent themselves to really make a difference.
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seer wrote:
Since their hook is low power at modest speeds, I think they are fighting a loosing battle against Via with the Eden platfrom.
Well, when they started they were talking about a CPU that could be used / programmed to execute I386 or PPC or Alpha or whatever instruction set you wanted.. That's I believe was the main reason for Transmeta to be considered a partner..
(That's IIRC tho)
Aye, "code-morphing" or some other such bollocks. Software reprogrammable CPU that so far has been x86 only. A 2GHz 68k clone would be nice though! :-D
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mdma wrote:
Aye, "code-morphing" or some other such bollocks. Software reprogrammable CPU that so far has been x86 only. A 2GHz 68k clone would be nice though! :-D
I think that pretty much was the hopes of every Amigan on the planet in the late 90's. I'd still think there'd be a niche market for such a processor, but obviously not in their radar. :-(
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Hi
AFAIK Transmeta WAS NOT Amiga Inc Partner.
Where is the official proof / statement about this partnership?
I have asked Transmeta about 68K morphing:
Their official answer: NOBODY use the obsolete 68K CPU anymore!
AMIGA is dead, long forgotten and nobody use it anymore.
About PowerPC morphing: Impossible!
I heard about "NON COMPETITOR" agreement with IBM, the creator of PowerPC and POWER CPU.
Perhaps the best option is Writable Instruction Set Computer (WISC) from Imsys or Reconfigurable Computers. But the speed of such CPU is slow.
http://www.imsys.se/documentation/manuals/tr-CjipTechref.pdf
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Ericsson was down do $0.50 in 2003. They are still alive and kicking.
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dammy wrote:
Pity, someone should have told them about the Amiga curse before it was too late. With it being at $1 @ share, I wonder who's going to buy it out for IP rights.
Dammy
I think this is more related to the VLIW curse than the amiga curse.
@asian1
I spoke to a Transmeta engineer five years ago about support of the 68k and his answer was that it was totally possible and in fact quite easy... All you have to do is licence their Code Morphing technology... These Dot Coms are so dumb :-)
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dammy wrote:
Pity, someone should have told them about the Amiga curse before it was too late. With it being at $1 @ share, I wonder who's going to buy it out for IP rights.
Dammy
Bwahahaha! The Amiga curse! :lol:
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VLIW Curse
See Itanium & Itanium 2 CPU abandoned by HP, the original designer of Mercer / Itanium.
http://www.arcade-eu.info/overview/2004/itanium.html
>Transmeta Engineer - ask for License
What is the name and the title of this engineer?
Is he / she still work at Transmeta?
I HAVE asked for the license, and I got the above reply.
Perhaps Transmeta sales department did not understand their own product (?).
What is the comparison of between "code morphing" performance and the real 68K, Coldfire or PowerPC?
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asian1 wrote:
VLIW Curse
See Itanium & Itanium 2 CPU abandoned by HP, the original designer of Mercer / Itanium.
http://www.arcade-eu.info/overview/2004/itanium.html
My point exactly.
>Transmeta Engineer - ask for License
What is the name and the title of this engineer?
Is he / she still work at Transmeta?
I have no idea, this was 5 years ago at the launch of the Crusoe. I actually wrote to the Sales department, but it was an engineer who replied.
I HAVE asked for the license, and I got the above reply.
Perhaps Transmeta sales department did not understand their own product (?).
What is the comparison of between "code morphing" performance and the real 68K, Coldfire or PowerPC?
Acroding to the guy who replied, supporting any CPU architecture is easy, even different ones at the same time... performance is very dependant upon the quality of the Code Morphing "Emulator"... I would expect the maximum performance to be similar to that of their x86 code.
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@ redrumloa
It's a bit far-fetched to blame the failure of Transmeta on Amiga, or why do you mention them as "Amiga, Inc partner archive" members ?
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AFAIK Transmeta WAS NOT Amiga Inc Partner.
It's debatable whether they were actually ever a partner, true. Amiga Inc *DID* list them as a partner at one time though.
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EntilZha wrote:
It's a bit far-fetched to blame the failure of Transmeta on Amiga, or why do you mention them as "Amiga, Inc partner archive" members ?
Blame on Amiga Inc? You are reading far to much into this. The current Amiga Inc has absolutey nothing to do with any success or failure of "partners" from years past. If you are talking about "The Amiga Curse", it's not me that mentioned it.
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There is of course, a natural curiosity to see what ever became of previous "partners". Like most here I'm sure, I was here reading every word posted, hanging on to every sentence back then anxious to see what would become of the Amiga, after every direction change. The "partners" were a critical piece of this, what role would they play? Now that the partnerships evaporated, it's still curious to see what they could have brought to the plate, or what they are up to. They all had a small hand in the history of the Amiga. Given in most cases a VERY small hand, as they all seem to have been a partner on paper only.
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Their "Code Morphing" technology never seemed to impressive to me. It was little more than a dynarec/JIT running from firmware on a somewhat specialized VLIW chip. Said chip was designed to be used for x86 emulation as it uses the x86 flag calculation behavior (flag calculation is easily the nastiest part of a CPU emulator to optimize, well at least when you're emulating a CISC CPU anyway).
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Their "Code Morphing" technology never seemed to impressive to me. It was little more than a dynarec/JIT running from firmware on a somewhat specialized VLIW chip.
It was a binary re-compiler, it recompiles the code on the fly the stores it on disc. Each subsequent thus gets faster.
DEC had great success with this in their FX32! x86 emulator for the Alpha, at one stage in the 90s the fastest x86 was actually an Alpha! One thing that halped though was the fact that the version of Windows it used was native so all the library calls were not emulated.
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Transmeta are, as far as I can tell about to get out of the chip business. They make more money off licensing their technology (i.e. they recently licnsed longrun 2 to Sony) than the CPUs so they're just going to do this instead.
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As for being in the same league as VIA, I doubt it, VIA is the undisputed champion of sucky CPUs, the Transmeta CPUs are not great but they don't suck *that* much.
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The dynarec inside the Crusoe didn't save anything to disk, it operated completely out of memory. Caching translated code to disk isn't practical when the emulation occurs underneath the operating system.