Transmeta mulls chip biz exit

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Jan. 05, 2005

Transmeta will announce on Jan. 21 whether it will continue producing microprocessors, according to an article at ExtremeTech. The company derives most of its revenue by licensing intellectual property (IP) to other chip vendors, and may move to a pure IP licensing business model, the article says.

Transmeta lost $27.5 million in its most recently reported quarter, announced last October. The company showed revenues of $7M, of which $3.7M were derived from licensing IP such as its LongRun2 power management technology to chip vendors such as NEC and Fujitsu.

Transmeta is a fabless chip vendor that outsources production of Transmeta-branded chips, such as the Crusoe and Efficeon. Discontinuing the chips could help the company better manage costs, by eliminating foundry costs, the ExtremeTech article suggests.

Transmeta's low-power chips have in the past targeted the embedded systems market, where long product lifecycles are highly valued. Uncertainty about the long-term availability of its chips could limit Transmeta's ability to sell to embedded system makers.

Transmeta's Crusoe and Efficeon chips are currently used in a range of embedded Linux based products, including Fujitsu thin clients, the OQO "ultra-personal computer," and the Xybernaut Atigo T web pad. Transmeta also offers board-level products to embedded developers, including a mini-ITX board based on its Crusoe chip, as well as a stratosphere Efficeon development board, which is barely larger than a PCMCIA card. The company also sells SE (special embedded) versions of its chips to board vendors such as Kontron and Tri-M, both of which offer Crusoe-based PC/104 boards.

Three months ago, Transmeta unveiled a 90nm die-shrink of its VLIW, x86-compatible Efficeon 2 processor. The Efficion 2 is already shipping at 1.6GHz, in products that include high-end Fujitsu laptops and "deskside cluster workstations" from Orion Multisystems. Transmeta in October announced the following roadmap for Efficeon 2:

1.8 - 2.0 GHz at < 25 watts TDP (thermal design power)
1.6 - 1.8 GHz at 12 watts
1.4 - 1.6 GHz at 7 watts
1.0 - 1.1 GHz at 3 watts

The Efficeon -- a follow-up to Transmeta's original Crusoe chip -- originally launched in October of 2003, just after Linux creator Linus Torvalds took a leave of absence from the company to join the OSDL.

The complete ExtremeTech article can be found here.

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