Transmeta Crusoe

en.wikipedia.org

7 points·theblazehen··4 comments

Not many remember that Linus Torvalds also was among Transmeta employees. They were so innovative with their processor technology, too bad their entire IP has been acquired by Intellectual Ventures, which essentially is a patent troll.

I'm willing to accept that not many know he worked there. I guess technically if you never knew something you can't remember it, but saying someone can't remember something usually implies they knew it at some point. I'm not willing to accept that a large segment of those that knew he worked there can no longer remember that fact without some basis for the claim. Did you perform some sort of research? You remembered he worked there and I remember her worked there so my available data points currently trend to a significant remembrance of the fact.

When reading "Transmeta", the first thing I'm thinking about is Linus - while I don't have a clue what they did besides "something something CPUs".

Fascinating company, fascinating product.

I still kinda wish they'd done something other than x86-32 support for their VLIW chips.

In principle, I see no reason that they couldn't have supported Motorola 68000, for instance. Even that (not 68030 or 68040, just 68000) would have been of considerable interest to hundreds of thousands of Commodore Amiga and Atari ST fans and users, enabling them to run their old OSes and apps at speeds equivalent to a 68000 at 500-600MHz or more.

(I am intentionally excluding Apple as the company was and is alive and well and would not only not have permitted classic MacOS 8.1 to run, but it offered PowerPC versions on hardware in that class of performance.)

Alpha Micro might have been interested for AMOS, too.

Now, 2 decades later, that is possible with FPGA hardware, but it wasn't then.

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