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 Windows 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. In October the company 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.
The complete
ExtremeTech article can be found
here.
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