“If you were looking to Comdex for the inside scoop on the
highly secretive start-up Transmeta, you were sorely disappointed.
In fact, you were probably misled to a large extent. Transmeta
was founded in 1995 by Dave Ditzel, the one-time chief architect of
Sun Microsystems’ Sparc processor family. Ditze didn’t make an
appearance, but Comdex did feature a keynote speech by Linus
Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system. Torvalds also
happens to be Transmeta’s best-known employee, even though he
signed up well after the start-up was formed. In terms of
hardware expertise, many members of the Texas Instruments team that
was disbanded after the company decided not to go ahead with a
Pentium-class clone were among the initial Transmeta recruits.”
“Nevertheless, Torvalds’ high profile has everyone from
programmers to pundits thinking Transmeta is a software-oriented
company, rather than a fab-less chip vendor, and that Torvalds is
the driving force behind the company’s activities.”
“That’s just plain wrong.”