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In 1997, STMicroelectronics (formerly SGS-Thomson and an early partner
of Cyrix) acquired design house Metaflow Technology. Rumor has it that
the company's high-performance x86 processor will be offered in a slot
1 module.
A secretive start-up named Transmeta has been working for about two years on a CPU for PCs, which is rumored to have its own internal instruction set but to use a fast software translator to execute x86 instructions. Transmeta has raised a large (undisclosed) amount of venture capital and is well staffed; a product debut is likely in 1999.
99/04/14, 11:17pm - Okay, keep in mind this should still be relegated to that part of the mill known as "rumour", but I was given some interesting info on the Transmeta design. I didn't directly quote it, because the last person I know to be directly quoted by a respectable website freaked out, thinking that he'd be caught by the local Gestapo. Stuff in parenthesis are generally my personal reflections. Here ya go: The Transmeta chip is a CPU with an embedded north bridge, working on a proprietary socket (eg: it won't be Socket-7, nor will it be for GTL+) Linus Torvalds, famous OS designer and sworn enemy of William Gates III, is on the team (yup, we have that confirmed) IBM is doing the fabbing (this sounds about right, given previous rumours) The design requires 16MB of special memory and a special flash chip. This is a software upgradable CPU, really the first of its kind (though Intel's current chip can be, I'm told, modified in microcode to some small degree). One of the possible benefits of this are as such: The Transmeta chip does not at start support 3DNow! or SSE instructions, but might be upgraded later to these. The chip is targeted, at least in part, to the mobile market, with their 500MHz version consuming 4W. (dunno if that's max or avg, but it still sounds pretty darn low). The 500MHz Transmeta chip isn't as fast as comparative Intel and AMD 500MHz chips (which may be in part because it's not a native x86 chip but instead using translation or emulation of a sort), and its 3D performance is apparently sub-par. The die is four times smaller than Intel's PIII, so production cost is very low (as an aside, this person implied that the chip would not be cheap, I have to clarify that point).
I'm pretty sure they are growing silicon, although I'm not 100% sure for
what. I believe it to be some sort of processor, as I know for a fact
that they were doing randomized instruction testing -- a common
technique for debugging CPUs.
While having lunch with several Transmeta employees (I used to live in
CA), they forgot I didn't work for them and started talking shop. They
stopped before saying too much, but they did let slip that they were
writing a video driver.
I have it from a reliable source that one of their employees has been seen browsing through the junk bins at Fry's, buying old computer games. This employee has no personal interest in computer games whatsoever, and so far as I know has no siblings or nieces/nephews of an age to play these games; also, these were reported to be old games. Now why would such a person be buying games like this?" Tom's Reply: We're sure they're growing silicon. We're sure there is something graphical involved (they've joined a couple PC video standards groups. We know they have a chip that can do on-the-fly translation of instruction sets. I think the big question is what are they going to do with all this?.
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Dear Friends, Very soon our quest will be over. At 12PM PST (which I believe is 3pm, east-coast time) Transmeta will announce the Crusoe processor. (Visit http://www.transmeta.com for info about how to view the announcement via streaming video). History will be made, Intel's stock price will drop, and it's all anyone will talk about for the next week. But we'll be able to say, "Yeah, we already knew!") (Note: Intel is planning on announcing some kind of low-power chip at the same time to try to steal Transmeta's thunder). Tons of rumors are coming out the day before the announcement. I'm being told, "hey, they've leaked NEW information!" only to find out that it is stuff that we've had on our web page for months.
Usually the press gets details before a big announcement which they are honor-bound to keep secret until the official announcement. The articles and headlines are already written by the time the official announcement has been made. I've been told that Transmeta isn't doing that, which is making the press actually work for a living... they're going to have to write their articles quickly to make their nightly deadlines. Before the official announcement happens, I'd like to take some time to thank everyone that helped collect rumors. I couldn't have done it without you. (And a "neener, neener!" to all the Transmeta employees that wouldn't divulge anything!) Now the difficult part begins for Transmeta. It's easy to create rumors and designs. It's easy to build a chip. The hard part is is to create a market, sell it, and fend off competition. I wish them all good luck. --tal
P.S. I plan on making this my last message to the mailing list. I'll
leave the list around for a couple weeks. If there is something extremely
exciting I may post 1-2 more messages.
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