August 11, 2003 9:00 PM PDT
High stakes for Transmeta's new chip
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Formerly code-named
The chip will initially appear in mininotebooks and tablet PCs, two relatively small markets where Transmeta chips are already found. But they will start being used in more standard-size notebooks, those with 12- to 14-inch screens, by the first quarter, he added.
If there is a company in need of a product boost right now, it's Transmeta. When it held its coming-out party in early 2000, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company promised that its Crusoe chips would tackle one of the major problems in notebook computing: short battery life caused by processor power consumption. The company struck deals with a number of Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers in fairly rapid succession and then held an initial public offering at the end of 2000.
Then reality hit. Intel began to pour more efforts into reducing power consumption, a push that culminated in the
In the second quarter, revenue came to $5.1 million, but net losses were $22 million.
Efficeon differs from its predecessors in that it can process eight instructions per clock cycle rather than the three or so executed by other high-end processors. (A 1GHz chip offers 1 billion cycles per second.) Processing more instructions at once will increase the performance of Efficeon over earlier Transmeta chips by 50 percent on standard applications and 80 percent on multimedia applications, according to the company. Increasing the work per clock cycle also further reduces energy consumption.
The chip will debut at over 1GHz and include
Transmeta plans to release more complete benchmarks for Efficeon at the
"Efficeon," a name derived from the chip's efficient use of energy, wasn't the company?s first choice, but it worked, DeNeffe said.
"We looked at lots of different versions of Astro: Astrino, Aztro," he said. Unfortunately, many of the Astro trademark variations were owned or controlled by Hanna-Barbera, creators of "The Jetsons" cartoon. Astro was the family dog on the show.
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"Trademarking and branding are getting more and more difficult," DeNeffe said. In print, the chip is spelled Efficeon. But in product branding, a small line appears over the second "e" to connote a long vowel sound.
"It has got kind of a French feel to it," DeNeffe joked.
