“Today Transmeta, the notebook semi-conductor specialist, is set
to IPO. … Their IPO timing is good. The vast, nervously turning
shoal of sprats that is Nasdaq has, on the basis of a recent report
by the SIA (Silicon Industry Association), has decided that
semi-conductors are up and profitable. Transmeta’s Crusoe has
maintained a high profile since launch and is set to sail to market
in an armada of notebooks from Sony, NEC, Fujitsu and Compaq.”
“There is, of course, a glaring exception to this list. Last
week, the flagship vendor of the fleet, IBM, ditched its plans to
include Crusoe within its Thinkpad notebook range, despite the fact
that IBM Microelectronics fabs currently produce all Crusoe
silicon. The announcement was greeted with a blizzard of
speculation within the industry.”
“The news coincided with the first published benchmark scores
from systems built around Crusoe. These were, at first glance, poor
– the standard industry benchmarks showed Crusoe failed to deliver
much more battery life and performance than a standard mobile
Pentium. On analysis, this isn’t surprising as the benchmarks
are designed for a single platform and simply record the time it
takes for a battery to drain when supporting a system running
flat-out. They don’t take into account how the Crusoe instruction
set exists in software and dynamically adjusts voltage
levels for the task in hand to increase battery life. Until a
benchmark is developed that can record this procedure, vendors
using Transmeta will have to rely on long term lease of production
kit to help reviewers become confident enough that the silicon
delivers what it promises.”