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.

I think more about the timing being incorrect - betting on software in an era of exponential hardware growth was unwise (software performance can’t scale that way). The problem is that you need to marry it with a significantly better CPU/architecture because the JIT is about not losing performance while retaining back compat.

However, if you add it onto a better CPU it’s a fine technique to bet on - case in point Apple’s move away from Intel onto homegrown CPUs.

> However, if you add it onto a better CPU it’s a fine technique to bet on - case in point Apple’s move away from Intel onto homegrown CPUs.

I don't think Apple is a good example here. Arm was extremely well-established when Apple began its own phone/tablet CPU designs. By the time Macs began to transition, much of their developer ecosystem was already familiar.

Apple's CPUs are actually notably conservative when compared to the truly wild variety of Arm implementations; no special vector instructions (e.g. SVE), no online translation (e.g. Nvidia Denver), no crazy little/big/bigger core complexes.

> no special vector instructions (e.g. SVE)

Wut - SVE and SME are literally Apple designs (AMX) which have been "back ported".