Intro

Have you the heard some of they hype recently about a new company called Transmeta? Most likely if you follow the industry, then you have heard something. I’m here today to tell you who Transmeta is, what they do, what their products are all about, and what you can expect, as well as a few of my rants.

Company Background

Transmeta is a company that is based from Santa Clara, CA, better known as Silicon Valley. They were founded in 1995 pretty much working for five years on a secret project. We didn’t find out what this was until January 19th, 2000 when an official conference was held for the press. Not is the Headquarter in Silicon Valley but they offices in Japan and Taiwan as well.

Transmeta has over 200 people working for them including the renowned Linus Torvalds, father of the Linux operating system. The company has a great team of some of the best engineers that have been doing processors since the beginning, as well as some of the greatest workers in a lot of other fields, which enabled them to come together and make a great product.

They have made some great partnerships with some companies including IBM and S3. They have quite a worth list business advisors and investors. Leading investors include Walden Funds, Vulcan Ventures, George Soros Fund, Deutsche Bank, Tudor, Integral, Invemed, Novus, and others.

What Do They Make Though?

Well you know its got to be something important or there wouldn’t be all this talk. If you own a notebook you have probably dealt with power problems and battery life, they just don’t last long enough. Well Transmeta came up with a great product that really fixes this problem. Basically on January 19th they announced a new family of processors called Crusoe. As of now there are two processors, one targeted towards a product you will see in the near future called web pads and mobile clients which are mini-notebooks. The other will be aimed at notebooks and thin+light notebooks. We will go into detail about each of these processors later in the article.