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What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

(dfarq.homeip.net)
180 points onename | 4 comments | 12 Nov 25 09:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.473s | source
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gdiamos ◴[12 Nov 25 11:25 UTC] No.45898849[source]▶
Transmeta made a technology bet that dynamic compilation could beat OOO super scalar CPUs in SPEC.

It was wrong, but it was controversial among experts at the time.

I’m glad that they tried it even though it turned out to be wrong. Many of the lessons learned are documented in systems conferences and incorporated into modern designs, ie GPUs.

To me transmeta is a great example of a venture investment. If it would have beaten Intel at SPEC by a margin, it would have dominated the market. Sometimes the only way to get to the bottom of a complex system is to build it.

The same could be said of scaling laws and LLMs. It was theory before Dario, Ilya, OpenAI, et al trained it.

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1. actionfromafar ◴[12 Nov 25 15:47 UTC] No.45901599[source]▶
Did anyone try dynamic recompilation from x86 to x86? Like a JIT taking advantage of the fact that the target ISA is compatible with with the source ISA.
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2. solarexplorer ◴[12 Nov 25 16:01 UTC] No.45901792[source]▶
Yes, I think the conclusion was that it did improve performance on binaries that were not compiled with optimizations, but didn't generate enough gains on optimized binaries to set of the cost of re-compilation.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358438.349303

(this is not about x86 but PA-RISC, but the conclusions would likely be very similar...)

3. tgma ◴[12 Nov 25 16:58 UTC] No.45902549[source]▶
Notably VMware and alike in pre-hardware virtualization era did something like that to run x86 programs fast under virtualization instead of interpreting x86 through emulation.
4. hinkley ◴[12 Nov 25 20:12 UTC] No.45905791[source]▶
I believe it was HP who accidentally tried this while making an early equivalent of Rosetta to deal with a hardware change on their mainframes and mini computers. They modified it to run same-same translations and they did get notable performance improvements by doing so.

I’m pretty sure this experiment happened before Transmeta existed, or when it was still forming. So it ended up being evidence that what they were doing might work. It also was evidence that Java wasn’t completely insane to exist.