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The geeks vs. the marketroids
The AOL-Time Warner deal sets the freewheeling Internet on a collision course with the masters of mass-market convenience.
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[01/14/00]

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[01/18/00]

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[01/18/00]

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By Damien Cave
[01/19/00]

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The Transmeta energizer
Silicon Valley's most secretive start-up finally unveils its product -- a cool chip design that'll keep your laptop battery going and going and going.

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By Andrew Leonard

Jan. 20, 2000 | After driving past the stone griffins that line the road to the ultra-posh Villa Montalvo, nestled in the hills of Saratoga, Calif.; after the free valet parking for what seemed like every tech journalist, microchip analyst and curious venture capitalist in Northern California; after the crowd-pleasing Linus Torvalds sighting; after four and a half years of stony silence, Transmeta Corporation finally revealed on Wednesday the truth behind what has been called the best kept secret in Silicon Valley.

Drum roll please: Transmeta's mystery gizmo is "Crusoe": a family of stamp-sized computer chips that promise to significantly boost battery life for laptops and handheld computing devices.

Anticlimactic? Not really. Transmeta's technology -- a mixture of software and hardware innovation -- is pretty darn cool, at least according to some of the visibly excited chip designers in attendance, and may well turn upside down the standard for how cutting-edge computer hardware is created. And let's face it, longer battery life may not be the sexiest thing in the world, but we all still hunger for it. If Transmeta delivers on its promises, a world of airplane-flying, laptop-pounding, spare battery-lugging computer users will be eternally grateful.

Still, after all the hype, all the wild speculation, all the hopes and dreams (Transmeta will overthrow Microsoft/Intel hegemony, Transmeta will deliver the fastest chips ever dreamed of, Transmeta will end world hunger and abolish poverty) -- it was a bit of an eye-opener to see half a decade of intensive work by a world class team of hardware and software engineers packaged and marketed as a cheap, energy saving device.

Sure there was plenty of talk about "code morphing" software and "smart microprocessors" that can optimize their performance on the fly. But the key, apparently, to Transmeta's business plan is to design chips that use so little power that computer manufacturers will be unable to resist incorporating them in their new devices. While Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe spent years stranded on a single island, lost and alone, Crusoe chips will be everywhere that power outlets are not. Is this the revolution we've all been waiting for?

In a way, yes. Transmeta is an odd bird, a throwback to an earlier generation of Silicon Valley start-ups that is playing by the rules of the brand new Internet game. Your average Internet start-up promises a revolution, but usually just delivers a clever Web site and a stunning IPO. Hype rules, and the successful manufacturing of buzz is sometimes all you need to pull off the "big win."

Transmeta, thanks in part to hiring Linux creator Linus Torvalds, and in part to maintaining secrecy in an environment where everyone else is mouthing off, has managed to cash in on the current go-go nuttiness. The press conference was a major league infotainment event -- complete with CNN cameras and a live Quake duel between Torvalds and Quake co-author Dave Taylor, dressed in tails and leather pants. (Sorry Linus fans, Linus got fragged, repeatedly, in a game so short as to be almost unseemly.)

But Transmeta, despite aiming its chip at the Internet world, is not actually an Internet start-up. It's a chip company -- it makes the guts of a computer, and as such, it is the proud inheritor of the valley's glorious past. The Net would not have been possible without the hardware companies that built the real computer revolution, chip by silicon chip.

And what is that revolution truly made of? Getting power to the people, right? Extending battery life might sound prosaic, but when you get right down to it, how better to improve our computing lives? How better to realize our science fiction dreams, than by making computers that are smaller, faster, cheaper and less power hungry.

Next page | Keeping the hardware simple, and the software working hard