“What is it about Transmeta CEO Dave Ditzel that makes you want
to believe him? Maybe it’s the way he unabashedly uses words like
“cool” and “neat.” Maybe it’s because he had the audacity to build
his upstart chip company within view of Intel headquarters. Maybe
it’s because he never completes a sentence, so enthusiastic is he
about Crusoe, his company’s brand of microprocessors. From last
January, when Crusoe was announced in a blaze of fanfare, until
mid-August, when the company filed to go public, Ditzel made
himself hoarse pushing the Crusoe chip. Whether in front of 200
engineers or a single reporter, his message was unflagging:
Crusoe-the Intel-compatible chip with one-tenth the power
requirements of a Pentium III-is going to change the world of
computing forever. ‘Crusoe is low-power, it’s compatible and it’s
high-performance,’ he said in one of a series of interviews held
before the August filing. ‘That’s our mantra.'”
“This summer, the company and Ditzel went silent for the quiet
period that follows every initial public offering. But by then the
Crusoe message had developed a life of its own: Not since the Apple
iMac had there been such a fuss in Silicon Valley like the one
Crusoe has brought ashore. It’s no surprise that Valley insider
rags Upside and Red Herring ran Transmeta as their cover stories
last spring, but before the quiet period began, Ditzel was also
quoted in Time, USA Today and a horde of other consumer
publications. Transmeta’s publicity efforts have fed in part on the
company’s hiring of Linux author and open-source software guru
Linus Torvalds. Torvalds has been part of the software design team
at Transmeta, and has lately been working on a version of Linux
that will complement Crusoe’s application in the exploding market
for mobile devices….”
“As is often the case in technology innovation, practice proved
harder than theory: Transmeta’s first chip design ran so slowly
that it took the chip half an hour just to boot the operating
system. But with each of four chip revisions, the team learned more
about binary translation. Five years of painstaking work-performed
by a brigade of 200 engineers backed by several hundred million
dollars of venture capital-produced a chip that ran fast enough to
compare favorably with Intel processors. In January of this year,
Transmeta announced the first two hybrid silicon/software chips in
the Crusoe line. The first, called TM5400, is a 700-megahertz chip
for the ultrathin, ultralight Windows notebook PCs. It runs
software written for Intel chips on a fraction of the power a
Pentium consumes. The second, the TM3120, is a 400-MHz chip
designed to run Internet appliances using a version of Linux that
Torvalds developed for mobile devices.”