Transmeta hooks Nvidia for $25m power payment
The longest run
Transmeta - yes, you remember them - has picked up a prominent licensee scalp in the form of Nvidia.
Transmeta today revealed that Nvidia will pay a one-time fee of $25m for a license to Long Run and LongRun2 - a pair of power management technologies. Such licensing deals have become Transmeta's main path to revenue - outside of suing Intel - ever since it gave up on making chips. Presumably, Nvidia will use the technology to squeeze a bit more energy efficiency out of is graphics processors.
Word of the Nvidia deal arrived as Transmeta issued second quarter financial results. Revenue for the period came in at $366,000, which is almost enough to get a studio apartment in East Palo Alto. Net income for Q2 was $214,000.
Transmeta had an embarrassing number of charges and other income items related to its large settlement with Intel, restructuring and stock compensation. After adding and subtracting all these items, Transmeta exited the quarter debt free with $142m in cash and other assets.
Shares of Transmeta were near a 52-week high ($15.70) at $14.67 per share at the end of today's trading. ®
COMMENTS
re:Good Lord and Adam Smith and King Edward
"Jesus would weep"
funny you must read a different bible, Jesus gave everything away and asked we do the same, remember he kicked out the money lenders from the church.
Paris. cuz I believe she sometime yells out the Lords name but thinking he's Irish; o'Jesus
*yawn*
Seriously, what did transmeta ever do that was any good?
In theory what they did was impressive - in practice it wasn't worth it. Pretty much all of their hardware was slow, some of it ran rather hot, and overall it wasn't that parsimonious on hardware as the whole system depends on support components in addition to the CPU.
Code morphing technology? In theory - amazing. In practice - where did it go? No real time java bytecode interpreter or similar, just a substandard x86 interpreter.
Given a few more years, perhaps they'd have produced something vaguely impressive, but they never got that far.
I love watching good competition games :)
When companies that deal in tech that I actually care about compete with each other, while not constantly trying to screw their competitors and/or customers whenever they feel it's in their interest, interesting collaborations and new technology start popping up around every corner. Intel and MS could learn a lot if they would get back to actually innovating the industry for innovations sake (I know MS has never actually done that), so people can actually own COOL stuff and not just prettied up junk that costs a months wage. And if their products are superior, people will keep buying them :P
I think Intel will be forced to catch up with the game and probably will, ie. not insist on trying to go it completely alone in their tech development, then playing catch up and only being in the lead in price/performance for a little while. I remember back when Intel dominated the high end and AMD and Cyrix were there for us poor bastards so we didn't have to settle for outdated tech. Today, AMD/ATI and nVidia still just keep surprising me just when things start to look boring.
Maybe I'll finally have that cheap hand held computer, with voice recognition, that can access my home server and run/display it's programs, and give me the internet wirelessly without giving me cancer (and with wired ability too for that matter, just in case), all in one easy to use package. Did I mention cheap. And before my hair goes grey? Other than silicon tech, computer tech advancements have the pace a slug would be ashamed of. And it doesn't count if only thousands of people can afford it, or if it only exists in a R&D environment ;-P
Good Lord and Adam Smith and King Edward
Dint that Torsvald fellow work for Transmeta? Before the alter of win32 I swear, I herd lately that even Intel and AMD have been decieved into supporting that Linux thing! Godless commies, anti-profit-motive theeves, destroying good Amerikan corporations! How will we save the Iraqis in the face of this double dealing!?!
Jesus would weep.
Honesty
Amazing, since a load of Transmeta staff took up jobs at Nvidia... honesty is the best policy (or, they could have taken a risk in secretly using the technology on the basis that Transmeta will go bust in the not to distant future...)
