Transmeta reveals masterplan to take on Intel in the client space

Linus Torvalds' Transmeta startup has claimed it intends to succeed where others have failed over the last two decades and compete with Intel in the processor market.

The revelation came on Wednesday after the steadfast refusal of Transmeta executives to talk to the media since the company was founded in 1995.

Despite the vow of silence, it has still managed to generate interest, however, by virtue of the people involved with it.

Linus Torvalds, the 'father of Linux', is a software engineer at the organisation; super-investors Paul Allen and George Soros have taken stakes in the firm; and the founder, David Ditzel, is a chip architect who was involved in the pioneering days of Risc at both AT&T's Bell Labs and Sun Microsystems.

But Transmeta attests that the difference between it and other Intel competitors that have fallen by the wayside is that the company is not attempting to compete with a silicon based product, but a software based one - and only in the client space with an ultra-light (two to four pounds) notebook computer.

Over the last five years it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital on its now named Crusoe development project and believes its chips will stimulate a new class of Internet appliance, which it generically calls a Web Pad.

Ditzel said the company intended to OEM its chips to PC and consumer electronics companies to embed in their products. It insisted that it already had customers, although it was up to them rather than Transmeta to reveal the offerings they were working on.

But he added that IBM was manufacturing the chips for it, and that Big Blue currently had engineers in Vermont analysing Crusoe's capabilities.

Crusoe's architecture is based on what Transmeta calls its Code Morphing Software (CMS). CMS ensures that machines with Crusoe processors are fully compatible with the x86 architecture even though the instruction set is in the software and not in the silicon.

CMS translates x86 based operating systems such as Windows and applications so they can be understood by a stripped down Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) silicon engine.

This process generates much less heat that a conventional Pentium chip so there is no need for heavy fans in the machine. However, Transmeta has also developed a power management capability that it claims can boost performance and double the length of time a notebook is able to work off a battery.