3 ms·

(edited) Hmm, if that's true it would be news to me. Do you have a reference? addendum: there's also the fact that Intel deployed many illegal tactics to bloc

(edited) Hmm, if that's true it would be news to me. Do you have a reference? addendum: there's also the fact that Intel deployed many illegal tactics to block Transmeta from selling to customers. This is another large part of why Transmeta failed. It seems entirely plausible that Intel pressured IBM to drop Transmeta as a customer.

jecel 6y ago
Found it (Google didn't help at all) on page 19 of the oral history of David Ditzel at the computer history museum. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2016/07/102737949-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... But I sort of remembered it wrong. Here he talks about having to switch from IBM but in page 16 he talks about the new lab not being able to make chips for a whole year as being the problem. "In the end, Transmeta didn't make it, and I'll just say here I think it was not because of the technologies. It actually turned out to be manufacturing problems. We switched fabs. The fab we switched to actually had a problem, and couldn't actually make our chips for a year. We had to prove where the issue was in the fab, and what was happening. They're not happy if I speak too much about those details. But, the technology itself worked fine."
- FullyFunctional 6y ago
  That's a very important distinction. The person who made that fatal decision against the objections of many (no, it wasn't Dave) bear much of the responsibility of the death of Transmeta. It was reckless and ultimately a disaster.
  - jecel 6y ago
    In 1999 I set up a company to develop a VLIW processor that used adaptive compilation (but for Smalltalk bytecodes instead of x86 instructions). I was taken more seriously after Transmeta announced Crusoe, then a lot less seriously when it failed. Even though the reasons for that were not technical, everybody remembers it wrong.

jecel 6y ago

Found it (Google didn't help at all) on page 19 of the oral history of David Ditzel at the computer history museum. https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2016/07/102737949-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... But I sort of remembered it wrong. Here he talks about having to switch from IBM but in page 16 he talks about the new lab not being able to make chips for a whole year as being the problem. "In the end, Transmeta didn't make it, and I'll just say here I think it was not because of the technologies. It actually turned out to be manufacturing problems. We switched fabs. The fab we switched to actually had a problem, and couldn't actually make our chips for a year. We had to prove where the issue was in the fab, and what was happening. They're not happy if I speak too much about those details. But, the technology itself worked fine."

FullyFunctional 6y ago
That's a very important distinction. The person who made that fatal decision against the objections of many (no, it wasn't Dave) bear much of the responsibility of the death of Transmeta. It was reckless and ultimately a disaster.
- jecel 6y ago
  In 1999 I set up a company to develop a VLIW processor that used adaptive compilation (but for Smalltalk bytecodes instead of x86 instructions). I was taken more seriously after Transmeta announced Crusoe, then a lot less seriously when it failed. Even though the reasons for that were not technical, everybody remembers it wrong.