“Transmeta Corp. will go to Comdex in Las Vegas later this
month flush with an impressive series of design wins. The company
is also poised to pile up a huge war chest of cash, because
its initial public offering (IPO) of stock is expected to hit the
market on Tuesday (Nov. 7).”
“Nevertheless, the company was buffeted this past week by
reports stating that IBM Corp. was pulling the plug on plans to use
Transmeta’s Crusoe processors in its Thinkpad notebook
computers….”
“Given the widespread media play of the IBM story, insiders
believe that Transmeta will have to run the tough stock market
gauntlet many technology startups have had to go through in recent
months. For this reason, those same insiders believe the IPO will
be subject to rigorous scrutiny by potential buyers.”
“On the technical front, IBM does have some research technology
up its sleeve that could mean potent competition for Transmeta’s
processors, which run the X86 instruction set. An IBM research team
in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., has implemented a low-level very-long
instruction word (VLIW) chip that has a relatively small number of
execution units – in this case, eight.”