What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

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.

They were also the first to produce an x86 CPU with an integrated northbridge, they could have pitched it more at embedded and industrial markets where SPEC scores are less important.