What people don't realize is that Transmeta wasn't actually trying to develop underpowered mobile processors. That is just what they wound up trying to sell.
The goal was a high performance architecture. The #1 barrier that they saw was heating. They therefore developed a very power efficient chip. They succeeded in that, but because they both took longer and were less efficient than hoped, they were underpowered compared to the market. However there was a niche that they could sell to.
From there their hope was that, being a fundamentally simpler chip, they could iterate faster. That would mean that eventually they would catch up on performance. Unfortunately for them, Intel's greater resources and experience meant that they iterated faster than Transmeta, despite having a much more complex architecture.
Transmeta was always going to either change the world or sink without a trace. They sank without a trace. But it was an interesting approach and was worth a try.
The transmeta saga is a long and varied one, and of the many phases of it, this is the one I was referring to. Not becoming a patent troll or shipping cell phone procs or whatever once they realized it wasn't going to work on servers and started scrambling to anything to keep head above water.
The transmeta cpu on servers pitch is almost word for word the ARM cpu on servers pitch, just maybe a dozen or so years later. This PR pitch might even work someday, maybe even this time. Just saying I've heard it all before and last time I heard it, it turned out this way...
From an engineering standpoint it seems almost impossible to optimize for both performance for this new market AND heat/power for your traditional market unless your R+D budget is absolutely insane compared to competitors only optimizing for one or the other. Note that R+D budget dollar value has almost no relationship with quantity shipped units being discussed in its place, probably because the real numbers are unfavorable.
The goal was a high performance architecture. The #1 barrier that they saw was heating. They therefore developed a very power efficient chip. They succeeded in that, but because they both took longer and were less efficient than hoped, they were underpowered compared to the market. However there was a niche that they could sell to.
From there their hope was that, being a fundamentally simpler chip, they could iterate faster. That would mean that eventually they would catch up on performance. Unfortunately for them, Intel's greater resources and experience meant that they iterated faster than Transmeta, despite having a much more complex architecture.
Transmeta was always going to either change the world or sink without a trace. They sank without a trace. But it was an interesting approach and was worth a try.