Boffins at Transmeta are having trouble making their x86 binary compatible VLIW chip sing, according to sources in Silicon Valley. The first attempt to produce a low power chip was not fruitful, forcing the designers to re-think their strategy. Our mole claims that after that early failure, Transmeta then refocussed on high performance, low power x86 MPUs based on VLIW architecture. Silicon was not good. Meanwhile, luminary Linus Torvalds is working on a highly tuned Linux kernel for whatever CPU emerges from Transmeta, our source added. The first offering from Transmeta will be like green jelly, our avian correspondent said -- not bad, but not very exciting. According to Vulture x87, while there is a large number of highly intelligent people working at Transmeta in both the operating system and instruction set architecture areas, they do not have a great deal of knowledge on actual silicon. Meanwhile, while Russian company Elbrus, which received funding from Moscow last week, may also be over-hyping its "Merced Killer", the word on the street is that it may have well have the edge on IA-64. According to Vulture x87, Elbrus architects were cosy with HP VLIW and (now) Transmeta architects a decade or so back. ® See also Moscow government to support Merced killer