History
The company began as a stealth startup. Transmeta attempted to staff the company in secret, although speculation online was not uncommon. One source of speculation was the company's bare-bones webpage. On November 12, 1999, a cryptic comment in the HTML appeared:
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. On January 19, 2000, Transmeta is going to announce and demonstrate what Crusoe processors can do. Simultaneously, all of the details will go up on this Web site for everyone on the Internet to see. Crusoe will be cool hardware and software for mobile applications. Crusoe will be unconventional, which is why we wanted to let you know in advance to come look at the entire Web site in January, so that you can get the full story and have access to all of the real details as soon as they are available.
The company was largely successful in hiding its ambitions until the official announcement. Over 2000 non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) were signed during the stealth period.
Throughout Transmeta's first few years, little was known about exactly what it would be offering. Its web site went online in mid-1997, and for approximately two and a half years displayed nothing but the text "This web page is not yet here." Information gradually came out of the company, suggesting of a very long instruction word-based (VLIW) design that translated x86 code into its own native code.
In fact, Transmeta marketed their microprocessor technology as extraordinarily innovative and revolutionary in the low-power market segment. They had hoped to be both power and performance leaders in the x86 space. But initial reviews of the Crusoe indicated the performance fell significantly short of projections. Also, during Crusoe development Intel and AMD significantly ramped up speeds and began to address increasing concerns about power consumption. So Crusoe was rapidly cornered into a low-volume, small form factor (SFF), low-power segment of the market.
In response, Transmeta quickly redesigned its technology, and produced the Efficeon processor. The Efficeon was claimed to have twice the performance of the original Crusoe CPU at the same frequency. But the performance was still weak relative to the competition, and the complexity of the chip had increased significantly. This greater size and power consumption may have diluted a key market advantage Transmeta's chips had previously enjoyed over the competition.
Transmeta has employed a number of industry luminaries such as Linus Torvalds and Dave D. Taylor. Initially, its purpose was kept secret, but partially because it had such talent amongst its staff, the industry was constantly abuzz with rumors in addition to 'conspiracy theories' resulting in excellent press relations (PR).
Torvalds left Transmeta in June 2003 to dedicate himself to the further development of the Linux kernel.
As an example of technology media hype, the company was once named as the Most important company in Silicon Valley in an Upside magazine editorial. Less well reported was that the company was never profitable while it was a chip vendor. In 2002, it had a loss of $114 million dollars, in 2003 a loss of $88 million, in 2004 a loss of $107 million.
As of January 2005 the company announced a strategic restructuring away from being a chip product company to an intellectual property company. That is, instead of selling chips, it will sell technology for use by other chip makers. In February 2005, some speculated that AMD might buy Transmeta. In March 2005 Transmeta announced that it was laying off 68 people, leaving 208 employees. About half of the remaining employees were to work on propagating the LongRun2 power optimization technology within Sony products. Sony was reported to be a key licensee of this Transmeta technology.
Transmeta CEOs:
- 1995 – 2001: David Ditzel
- 2001 – 2001: Mark Allen
- 2001 – 2002: Murray Godman & Hugh Barnes
- 2002 – 2005: Matt R. Perry
- 2005 – 2007: Art Swift
- 2007 – 2009: Lester Crudele
Read more about this topic: Transmeta
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