[helpc] Transmeta va mal

Les processeurs révolutionnaires de Transmeta semblent ne pas tenir leurs promesses. Les Crusoe sont certes économes en puissance électrique mais leurs performances restent trop modestes face à la concurrence d'Intel. En effet, les processeurs ULV du fondeur de Santa Clara ont réduit leur consommation au point de faire beaucoup d'ombre à Transmeta. Du coup, beaucoup de constructeurs restent fidèles à Intel...
Comme si cela ne suffisait pas, Transmeta tarde à livrer ses processeurs : Sony attend des TM5800 tandis que Fujitsu n'a toujours pas reçu les TM5800 et TM5500 commandés. Transmeta ne possède pas de chaîne de production et se repose sur TSMC. Mais ce dernier donne la priorité à nVidia et à VIA dont la production dégage bien plus de bénéfices.

Source :

Transmeta to Face the Disaster [4:54 pm] Rat

And things at first went so well! How much positive feedback appeared right after the launching of the first Crusoe processors from Transmeta. But time passed and almost "revolutionary" Transmeta’s developments turned into "original but problematic". Here we can mention the not completed "Code Morphing Software", the delayed launching of the new models, the relatively low performance. And the major mobile solutions developer, Intel, didn’t stay idle all this time. They worked out and launched their novelties, which finally pushed Crusoe CPUs into the farthest corner of the market, which they will hardly ever manage to leave.

All in all, Transmeta’s situation is getting worse and worse day by day, and its formerly active partners give up cooperation with this company one by one, as we read over here. Another two companies to stop cooperating with Transmeta on that appeared Japanese Toshiba and Sharp, which got tired of endless waiting for Crusoe TM5800 and simply shifted to Intel CPUs.

Though Japan still remains Transmeta’s last hope: Sony and Fujitsu are still waiting for Crusoe chips (Sony is waiting for TM5800 and Fujitsu – TM5800 and TM5500). However, they are also not going to wait forever. To be fair we should say that not much depends on Transmeta here: the only chips manufacturer, which can provide production lines for 0.13micron technology, TSMC, doesn’t have any free lines: the plants work at the tope of their capacity. Moreover, they are producing more profitable solutions: NVIDIA chips and VIA processors, which they cannot that easily give up. So, Transmeta will have to wait for a while, we believe. Maybe even until UMC puts its 0.13micron production lines into service, which should happen some time in H2’02.