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What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

(dfarq.homeip.net)
180 points onename | 1 comments | 12 Nov 25 09:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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rsynnott ◴[12 Nov 25 11:22 UTC] No.45898820[source]▶
> But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms

I'm not sure that that's really correct; they were very desktop-oriented.

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drob518 ◴[12 Nov 25 12:01 UTC] No.45899110[source]▶
Well, they ended up being mobile-oriented, but even that didn’t work. They were definitely not server-oriented and they really couldn’t compete at desktop. Honestly, while the tech was interesting, it wasn’t really solving a problem that anyone was struggling with.
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1. dlcarrier ◴[12 Nov 25 15:46 UTC] No.45901582[source]▶
They probably would have worked well as server processor, because they were pretty energy efficient, but they were slow the first time a program was run, but sped up after caching the translation. Most servers run the same software over and over again, so they could have been competitive.

It would have been an extremely difficult time to enter the market though, because at the time Intel was successfully paying server manufacturers to not offer superior competing products.