Transmeta
More info
- Creator
- David Ditzel et al.
- Released
- 1995–2009
- Type
- Processor company
A Californian chip company that translated x86 code into VLIW in software and promised laptops that would last a full day on battery.
Founded in 1995 with money from Paul Allen among others, it spent five years refusing to say what it was building, and was best known for having lured Linus Torvalds away from Helsinki. When Crusoe was unveiled in 2000 it turned out to be a simple VLIW core under a layer of code morphing software that translated x86 instructions on the fly and cached the results.
Power draw was low; so was performance. Intel answered with the Pentium M and Centrino, and the follow-up Efficeon (2003) never caught up. Transmeta turned into a patent licensing shop, sued Intel and settled for 250 million dollars in 2008. Novafora bought what was left the following year. Translating one instruction set into another in software lives on, Apple's Rosetta 2 being the best-known example.