“Five years ago this month, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. paid
through the nose to acquire NexGen, a plucky but profitless little
microprocessor design house that had been a hot initial public
offering just months before. This year, the technology community is
abuzz over whether the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker might do
it again, this time with Transmeta Corp., the stealthy but
self-promotional 364-employee designer of low-power microprocessors
for notebook computers.”
“It is a stretch. AMD, which saw its best earnings in history
last year, is nowhere near as visibly desperate as it was when it
put up $840 million in stock for tiny NexGen in 1995. Then, the
microprocessor market’s smaller players were under pressure to come
up with a chip that could compete with Intel Corp.’s new,
high-performance Pentium line. AMD didn’t quite have one yet;
NexGen did but it didn’t have the manufacturing facilities to meet
demand. NexGen was losing money, AMD was losing market share. The
merged duo continued to lose both together for years following the
marriage, but when AMD rebounded spectacularly in 2000, analysts
were quick to point out that the company couldn’t have done it
without NexGen.”
“AMD doesn’t, by anyone’s estimation, need highflying,
cash-burning $3.2 billion market capitalization Transmeta right
now, and the only confirmed deal the two have made simply involves
AMD using the upstart’s code-morphing software to simulate its
not-yet-manufactured server chips for software development.
Code-morphing is a process that shifts much of the work that a
microprocessor does from hardware to software code.”