“Dell’s cosy relationship with Intel, and a little
carelessness with secret files, is causing the company serious
grief with Transmeta, a usually reliable source alleges. “Dell has
been calling Transmeta every week for the last two months,” he
says, but Transmeta won’t return the calls.“
“According to our source Dell’s problem dates back some way, to
the time when Transmeta was hawking its wares around the PC
business. “It appears that Dell ‘shared’ all its Transmeta info
with Intel,” he says. “Transmeta found out about this and was not
too happy, cutting off Dell from all information, since giving
information to Dell is ‘like giving it to Intel.'”
“Naturally, we at The Register are sure that a fine upstanding
company like Dell would never disclose information given to it
under NDA, so the story must surely be entirely untrue.
Nevertheless, our source – who seems remarkably well informed in a
number of other Transmeta-related areas – insists that Dell is
increasingly desperate to be allowed into the tent. It has gone to
the lengths of commissioning Quanta, the Taiwanese company that was
to have built IBM’s Transmeta machines, to modify one of its boards
so that Dell can evaluate it.”