Yep, i know they're long dead, but, i remember about 6 months ago, Frosty and i were discussing what transmeta should have done to survive, i said. "i think that transmeta instead of taking AMD and Intel head on, they should have instead acquired the skills, rights and licenses to produce budget versions of intel and AMD's cpus".
And i mean budget, where they skimp on materials so that 3.2GHz really is 3.2GHz and you really couldn't overclock it because the materials were sooo budget.
i think transmeta would have been very popular if they did this...they would be excellent for OEM PCs, great for cash strapped people who want the performance of a high end cpu but the cost of a celeron and they would have been Tiny, Dell and Time's best friend.
it worked with graphics cards to a degree, thanks to the likes of powercolour and connect 3d yes i am aware that still only use nvidia or ati's reference specs for their cards but they are allowed to skimp on areas such documentation, free games, ram and cooling solutions etc.


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. Unfortunately, that was a possibility 15-20 years ago, but it's not now. Only the real big boys who can invest billions in state of the art fabs can play the game. AMD used to just reverse engineer Intel chips and sell their own version cheaper. The courts told them to stop that though, hence they designed the K6. Had that not been a success, there's a good possibility that Intel would have had the entire x86 market to themselves.