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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Monday, January 17, 2005

Transmeta -- how a great idea, brilliant minds and big investors equaled a big flop

Mercury News:

Great ideas don't always make for great businesses. Just look at Transmeta.

In early 2000, the Santa Clara start-up unveiled its plans for a power-saving computer chip amid a blizzard of hype. "If it's mobile and it has a browser, it will use a Transmeta chip," boasted company founder David Ditzel on the day of the launch.

Although the market that Transmeta helped create flourished, the company did not. This month, it all but said it was turning out the lights.

What happened?

I'll tell you what happened. The Pentium-M happened. Transmeta's flaw was that it was emulating x86 hardware, slowly. The company's only true success was getting Intel off its ass and away from the Pentium 4/4M series and into a new, truly mobile chipset, the Centrino, which included the Pentium-M processor. We can all thank Transmeta for that. But unlike the Transmeta Crusoe, Intel's solution performed amazingly well right out of the gate. Game over.

[ Posted at 8:11 PM | Permalink ]