Transmeta's Crusoe Sets Sail

Smart Business, June 2001
by Thomas Claburn

The public fascination with Transmeta (our Company of the Year in January) and its energy-efficient Crusoe chip has dwindled; the romance and the mystery are gone, as reported in "Abandon Chip" (March, page 46). Absent the media's adoration and spurned by IBM, Compaq, and Dell, the upstart chip maker is looking for love elsewhere—in the arms of the other would-be Intel-killer, Advanced Micro Devices, if rumors hold true. But Brian Alger, a research analyst for Pacific Growth Equities, remains skeptical about such a union. "The rumor has been around for a while," he says. "It stems from when the two companies started working together so Transmeta could license its dual data rate interface. I view the chance that the two companies would get together as extremely unlikely." Still, Transmeta's white knight may come—in the form of California's power crisis. Rebel.com's new Crusoe-driven server consumes a quarter of the power of Intel and AMD-based offerings. That's a significant savings for companies with hundreds of servers. With the West on the edge of darkness, Transmeta's prospects look at least a bit brighter.