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What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO

(dfarq.homeip.net)
205 points onename | 1 comments | 12 Nov 25 09:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.246s | 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. andrewf ◴[12 Nov 25 20:35 UTC] No.45906222[source]▶
At the time I recall https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/301631.301683 being an oft-discussed data point - speeding up DEC Alpha code by recompiling it into different DEC Alpha code using runtime statistics.

This was commonly cited in forum debates about whether Java and C# could come close to the performance of compiled languages. ("JITs and GCs are fast enough, and runtime stats mean they can even be faster!" was a common refrain, but not actually as true in 1999 as it is in 2025)