Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.
Code Morphing Software (CMS) consisted of an interpreter, a runtime system and a dynamic binary translator. x86 instructions were first interpreted one instruction at a time and profiled, then depending upon the frequency of execution of a code block, CMS would progressively generate more optimized translations.
The VLIW core implemented features specifically designed to accelerate CMS and translations. Among the features were support for general speculation, detection of memory aliasing and detection of self modifying x86 code.
The combination of CMS and the VLIW core allowed for the achievement of full x86 compatibility while maintaining performance and reducing power consumption.
Transmeta was founded in 1995 by Bob Cmelik, Dave Ditzel, Colin Hunter, Ed Kelly, Doug Laird, Malcolm Wing and Greg Zyner.
Its first product, the Crusoe processor, was launched on January 19, 2000. Transmeta went public on November 7, 2000. On October 14, 2003, it launched its second major product, the Efficeon processor. In 2005, Transmeta increased its focus on licensing its portfolio of microprocessor and semiconductor technologies. After layoffs in 2007, Transmeta made a complete shift away from semiconductor production to IP licensing. In January 2009, the company was acquired by Novafora and the patent portfolio was sold to Intellectual Ventures. Novafora ceased operations in August 2009. Intellectual Ventures licenses the Transmeta IP to other companies on a non-exclusive basis.
Transmeta produced two x86 compatible CPU architectures: Crusoe and Efficeon – internal code names were 'Fred' and 'Astro'. These CPUs have appeared in subnotebooks, notebooks, desktops, blade servers, tablet PCs, a personal cluster computer, and a silent desktop, where low power consumption and heat dissipation are of primary importance.
Before the 2009 acquisition by Novafora, Transmeta had moderate success licensing its IP. Licensors for Transmeta technology are Intel (with a perpetual, non-exclusive license to all Transmeta patents and patent applications, including any that Transmeta might acquire before December 31, 2017), Nvidia (with non-exclusive license to Transmeta's LongRun and LongRun2 technologies and other intellectual property), Sony (LongRun2 licensee), Fujitsu (LongRun2 licensee) and NEC (LongRun2 licensee).
History
Stealth start-up
Founded in 1995, Transmeta began as a stealth start-up. The company was largely successful in hiding its ambitions until its official company launch on January 19, 2000. 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."
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.
Transmeta attempted to staff the company in secret although speculation online was not uncommon. Information gradually came out of the company suggesting it was working on a very long instruction word (VLIW) design that translated x86 code into its own native VLIW code.
Public launch On January 19, 2000, Transmeta held a launch event at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California and announced to the world that it had been working on an x86 compatible dynamic binary translation processor named Crusoe. It also released an 18-page whitepaper describing the technology.
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 Crusoe indicated the performance fell significantly short of projections. Also, while Crusoe was in development, Intel and AMD significantly ramped up speeds and began to address concerns about power consumption. So Crusoe was rapidly cornered into a low-volume, small form factor (SFF), low-power segment of the market.
On November 7, 2000 (US election day), Transmeta had their initial public offering at the price of $21 a share. The value reached a high of $50.26 before settling down to $46 a share on opening day. This made Transmeta the last of the great high tech IPOs of the dot-com bubble. Their opening day performance would not be surpassed until Google’s IPO in 2004.
The company had its first layoffs in July 2002, reducing the headcount of the company by 40%.
On October 14, 2003, Transmeta announced the Efficeon processor which was claimed to have twice the performance of the original Crusoe CPU at the same frequency. However, performance was still weak relative to the competition and the complexity of the chip had increased significantly. The greater size and power consumption may have diluted a key market advantage Transmeta's chips had previously enjoyed over the competition.
In January 2005, the company announced its first strategic restructuring away from being a semiconductor product company and began to focus on licensing intellectual property. In March 2005, Transmeta announced that it was laying off 68 people while retaining 208 employees. Sony was reported to be a key licensee of Transmeta technology and approximately half of the remaining employees were to work on LongRun2 power optimization technology for Sony.
On May 31, 2005, Transmeta announced the signing of asset purchase and license agreements with Hong Kong’s Culture.com Technology Limited. The deal fell apart due to delays in obtaining technology export licenses from the US Department of Commerce and the parties announced the termination of the agreements on February 9, 2006.
On August 10, 2005, Transmeta announced its first-ever profitable quarter. This was followed by GameSpot’s March 20, 2006 report that Transmeta was working on an “unnamed” Microsoft project. As it turned out, this was a secure platform under the AMD brand for Microsoft's FlexGo program.
On October 11, 2006, Transmeta announced that they had filed a lawsuit against Intel Corporation for infringement of ten Transmeta U.S. patents covering computer architecture and power efficiency technologies. The complaint charged that Intel had infringed and was infringing Transmeta's patents by making and selling a variety of microprocessor products, including at least Intel's Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core and Core 2 product line.
On February 7, 2007, Transmeta shut down its engineering services division terminating 75 employees in the process. This was concurrent with an announcement that the company would no longer develop and sell hardware and would focus on the development and licensing of intellectual property. Subsequently, AMD invested $7.5 million in Transmeta, planning to use the company's patent portfolio in energy-efficient technologies.
On October 24, 2007, Transmeta announced an agreement to settle its lawsuit against Intel Corporation. Intel agreed to pay $150 million upfront and $20 million per year for five years to Transmeta in addition to dropping its counterclaims against Transmeta. Transmeta also agreed to license several of its patents and assign a small portfolio of patents to Intel as part of the deal. Transmeta also agreed to never manufacture x86 compatible processors again. One significant sore point in the Intel litigation was the payout of approximately $34M to three of Transmeta's executives. In late 2008, Intel and Transmeta reached a further agreement to transfer the $20 million per year in one lump sum.
On August 8, 2008, Transmeta announced that it had licensed its LongRun and low power chip technologies to Nvidia for a one time license fee of $25 million. On November 17, Transmeta announced the signing of a definitive agreement to be acquired by Novafora, a digital video processor company based in Santa Clara, California, for $255.6 million in cash, subject to adjustments dependent on working capital. The deal was finalized on January 28, 2009, when Novafora announced the completion of its acquisition of Transmeta.
Intellectual Venture Funding LLC completed the acquisition of the patent portfolio formerly developed and owned by Transmeta Corporation on February 4, 2009.
Due to financial troubles and inability to execute, Novafora collapsed in late July, 2009.
Management and staff Corporate governance Transmeta had a succession of 6 different chief executive officers who ran the company over its lifetime.
CEO Years of service David Ditzel 1995–2001 Mark Allen 2001–2001 Murray Goldmanw/ Hugh Barnes as COO 2001–2002 Matt R. Perry 2002–2005 Art Swift 2005–2007 Lester Crudele 2007–2009
Notable employees Among its crew of technologists, Transmeta employed some of the industry's more public figures including Linux founder Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel developer Hans Peter Anvin, Yacc author Stephen C. Johnson, and game developer Dave D. Taylor. Partially because of the presence of these figures, the industry was constantly abuzz with rumors and 'conspiracy theories' resulting in excellent press relations.
Financial history The following charts show the company's revenues, operating expenses, gross profits and net losses from 1996 through 2007. Numbers are in 1000s as per the 10-K reports. The company was once named as the Most important company in Silicon Valley in an Upside magazine editorial but failed to obtain profitability while it was a chip vendor.
Funding Transmeta received a total of $969M in funding during its lifetime.
Year Quarter Amount($ million) Notes 1996 – 288 – 2000 Q2 88 – 2000 Q4 273 IPO 2003 Q4 83 Secondary offering 2007 Q2 7.5 AMD 2007 Q4 150 Intel settlement 2008 Q3 80 Intel settlement
Products
Crusoe
Crusoe was the first family of microprocessors from Transmeta, named after the literary character Robinson Crusoe.
Transmeta lost much credibility and endured significant criticism due to the large discrepancies between projected performance and power consumption and the actual results. Although power consumption was somewhat better than Intel and AMD offerings, the end user experience (i.e. battery life) only showed a marginal overall improvement. First, the Code Morphing Software (CMS) combined with cache architecture artificially inflated comparisons between benchmarks and real-world applications. This is due to the repetitive nature of benchmarks and their small footprints. The CMS software overhead may have actually been a key cause of much lower performance for many real-world applications; the simple VLIW core architecture could not compete on computationally intensive applications; and the southbridge interface was limited by its low bandwidth for graphics or other I/O-intensive applications. Some standard benchmarks even failed to run, throwing the claim of full x86 compatibility into doubt.
Efficeon