Company Touting New Chips for Low Cost and Simplicity
A Silicon Valley start-up on Wednesday announced a family of microprocessors that experts say could radically reduce the complexity and cost of microchips while improving battery life for mobile computing devices such as the lightest notebook PCs and Internet-linked appliances.
If Transmeta Corp.’s claims prove true and the company can land major PC makers as customers--big ifs--it could eventually wield substantial influence in the Internet industry.
“Is this going to change the world tomorrow? No. But they definitely have some revolutionary technology that will have an impact” on mobile devices, said Linley Gwennap, analyst at Linley Group in Mountain View.
Transmeta has generated buzz in high-tech circles, partly for having been highly secretive about its work since its founding in 1995, partly for its high-profile investors, who include Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and global financier George Soros.
The privately held 200-person company, based in Santa Clara, also boasts some respected technologists, including Chief Executive David Ditzel, a chip pioneer formerly with Sun Microsystems, and programmer Linus Torvalds, author and namesake of the Linux operating system.
Industry observers were impressed with Transmeta’s expertise, but noted that the company faces powerful and larger competitors and has yet to prove its technology with successful products.
Ditzel said that the first members of Transmeta’s chip family--dubbed “Crusoe” after the fictional shipwrecked adventurer--solves a fundamental problem in an increasingly mobile, Web-connected era: Microprocessors have become too complex, consume too much power and give off too much heat.
“The complexity of these chips was going out of control,” Ditzel said, which led to a multitude of bugs and run-away manufacturing costs. Crusoe uses a process called “code morphing” to run applications designed for standard chips. This software technique simplifies the processing of standard Windows applications to operate effectively on Transmeta’s smaller, cooler, less power-hungry chips.
Transmeta has contracted with IBM to manufacture the Crusoe processors--a service Big Blue provides for other chip-design firms that lack fabrication plants.
The fastest version of the Crusoe for notebook PCs will run at 700 megahertz and sell to PC manufacturers for $329, the firm said. By comparison, Intel’s 650 megahertz processor unveiled Tuesday sells for $637. The speed rating does not mean that the Crusoe is faster than the Pentium III; it actually runs Windows applications slightly more slowly, but close enough to seem equivalent to users, Ditzel said.
The Transmeta product uses only 1 watt of power, compared with about 5 watts for the Intel chip.
The latest Intel chips perceive whether the computer is plugged in or operating off battery power and, in the latter case, reduces the processor’s speed to conserve power.
Transmeta said that the Crusoe goes further--sensing and adapting to each user’s habits and adjusting the amount of power consumed to the lowest setting without reducing processing speed. This and other improvements should permit a full day’s work on a single battery charge, or about twice the current length of comparable notebook computers, the company claims.
Some analysts were skeptical, however, because the processor accounts for only one-quarter to one-third of a notebook PC’s power consumption, the rest going to components such as the data storage drives and display screen.
About 20 million notebooks are sold annually, less than 20% of all PCs, according to Mercury Research in Scottsdale, Ariz. But it’s the fastest growing segment of the PC market. Analysts said that Transmeta could be highly successful if it can supply chips for as little as 10% of the notebook PC market.
Ditzel declined to name which PC makers will use the Transmeta processors, but said “we’re working with most of the companies building notebooks on the planet,” and many of those should begin to sell Crusoe-based products this summer.
Ultimately, Transmeta’s business will depend on the success of the fledgling market for Internet-connected hand-held computers--a sector poised to take off soon, experts said. Products using another version of the Crusoe, such as small Web pads for wireless browsing based on the Linux operating system, should be available in spring.
“The [hand-held] market is very small today, and nobody is a dominant player because the standards are still being set,” Gwennap said.
But even in the Internet appliance market, Transmeta will face formidable competition from such industry giants as Motorola, Hitachi and Intel.
