Transmeta's low-power chip could appear in Internet appliances as soon as midyear, Ditzel says.
Transmeta's chips can be rejigged to emulate any microprocessor, or more than one at once.
This explains why Transmeta is, initially at least, aiming its products at the portable-computer market.
Designed for laptops, the Transmeta chips may find a vaster market by solving the electricity crisis.
Intel countersued Transmeta the following January, accusing the company of violating its own patents.
Transmeta sued Intel in 2006, accusing it of violating Transmeta patents with its chips.
One thing Transmeta and AMD already have in common is their history with Intel.
The investment therefore indicates that AMD thinks Transmeta will be around for a while.
Still, as the bad news mounted for Transmeta, demand for its 13 million-share IPO increased.
Transmeta may avoid that issue, since an important part of its technology is implemented in software.
Transmeta's approach seems, in contrast, so simple that it is surprising that nobody thought of it before.
To understand what is so clever about Transmeta's idea, it is necessary to recall how today's chips work.
Transmeta's shares also 24 cents, but that was a 34.3% rise that brought the company to 94 cents.
ProFund Advisors' William Seale hit the bull's-eye by selecting Transmeta as a stinker.
Transmeta drew attention last year by keeping its product plans tightly under wraps.
Transmeta officials either aren't afraid of Intel or are disguising their fear well.
Transmeta has been hyped for years as a strong challenger to Intel's hegemony.
Mr Torvalds himself now works for Transmeta, a chip-design firm in Silicon Valley.
Chapman thinks that advantage extends to Internet appliances, which promise to be a bigger market for Transmeta than ultralight PCs.
The result was that Transmeta became irrelevant. (See "Transmeta Defies Bad News" and "Dog Of The Day: Transmeta").
In exchange for its cash, AMD will receive preferred Transmeta (nasdaq: TMTA - news - people ) stock.
Secondly, Transmeta offers investors a chance to buy into the next big thing, if things work out as the company hopes.
Even if Transmeta can live up to all the hype, there is no guarantee that it will be a commercial success.
Some analysts say code morphing isn't quite as revolutionary as Transmeta suggests.
Ultimately, however, the self-tuning nature of the Transmeta chip design could offer advantages in desktop machines and high-performance servers as well portables.
It did no less than force Transmeta into irrelevance (See "Transmeta Defies Bad News" and "Dog Of The Day: Transmeta").
Think of the savings if servers were to run on Transmeta chips.
The appliances use Transmeta's TM3120 processor, which is available at speeds of up to 400 MHz and runs a mobile version of Linux.
More important, the Transmeta chip is able to maintain statistics about which parts of the program it is running are executed most often.
"Quite frankly, what Intel showed off last week was an afterthought, " says Jim Chapman , Transmeta's senior vice president of sales and marketing.
应用推荐