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2004 MA XIM UMPC
Why Transmeta
Failed
Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and
is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.FAST FORWARD BY TOM R. HALFHILL
Quick Start
JUNE 2005 MA XIMUMPC
Anyone Want a 1TB Disk Drive? Holla!
New tech paves the way for massive increases in storage
capacityTodaYs hard driVes store data
on magnetic particles that are
arranged horiZontal to their
platter surfaces. /n neXt-gen
driVes, these particles will
be arranged perpendicular to
the platter, a trick that will
dramaticallY increase areal
densitY and lead to tremendous
gains in storage capacitY.A
nother one bites the dust. Well, almost. Transmeta
isn’t completely out of business, but it has been
forced to downsize and radically change course in order
to slow the arterial bleeding still threatening to kill the
wounded company. What went wrong?
Almost everything went wrong. The worst effect
of Transmeta’s downfall, however, isn’t the millions
of dollars bled from stockholders or the retreat of
Transmeta’s processors from the market. (Transmeta’s
last-ditch strategy is to gradually stop selling chips
in favor of licensing its technology and engineering
services to other companies.) No, the worst fallout is the
impact on the investment community. It will be years—if
ever—before another startup gets the massive funding
needed to challenge Intel’s supremacy in PC processors.
For the foreseeable future, only AMD will offer any
significant competition against the mighty empire. (VIA
still makes PC processors, but it’s a bit player.)
When Transmeta was founded in 1995, it began with
big ambitions and a big disadvantage. Intel is a huge
company with vast financial resources, world-class
engineering, and its own chip-fabrication plants. By
contrast, Transmeta is a small, fabless semiconductor
company that subcontracts its chip manufacturing to
independent foundries. After years of design effort,
Transmeta realized it couldn’t beat the performance of
Intel’s desktop processors.
Part of the problem was Transmeta’s radical new
approach to microprocessor design. By themselves,
Transmeta processors can’t run x86 software. They rely
on emulation—the company prefers to call it “code-
morphing software”—to achieve x86 compatibility.
Despite using the best emulation technology available,
Transmeta couldn’t match Intel’s desktop performance.
But by moving some complexity from the chips into the
emulation software and inventing its LongRun voltage/
frequency-scaling technology, Transmeta slashed power
consumption. So the company decided to focus on
notebook and embedded processors.
Five years ago, when Transmeta introduced its
first Crusoe chips, company officials objected to my
opinion that emulation overhead would cripple Crusoe.
“Overhead” was obsolete, they insisted—code morphing
wasn’t a handicap. Now we know better.
When Intel, AMD, VIA, and other companies imitated
LongRun, Crusoe was in stormy seas. When Intel did
as I predicted and created its own low-power design
(Pentium M/Centrino), Crusoe was shipwrecked.
Transmeta was overwhelmed by Intel’s superior
resources. Although I salute Transmeta for having
the gumption to try, and for creating some innovative
technology, I marvel at the investors who bet so much
money on such a long shot.S
ince the dawn of time, bits
representing data have been
stored on horizontally aligned
magnetic particles—arranged end to
end in a concentric circle—around
a hard drive platter. Manufacturers
have succeeded in storing more
and more bits on each platter by
increasing areal density: shrinking
the particles and packing them
closer together.
But when the particles become
too small, a phenomenon known
as the superparamagnetic effect
occurs: The magnetic particles
interfere with each other and lose
their ability to maintain a magnetic
orientation. Their north and south
poles spontaneously reverse, and the
data on the platter
becomes corrupted.
Hitachi and
Toshiba recently
found a relatively
simple way around
this problem: By
arranging the
magnetic particles
on the platter in
a perpendicular,
rather than
horizontal,
orientation, they
can substantially
increase areal
density without
worrying about the
superparamagnetic
effect corrupting
the bits.
According
to Hitachi, this
perpendicular
recording
technology will
pave the way
for 3.5-inch disk
drives capable of
storing as much as one terabyte of
data by 2007, as well as microdrives
that boast 20GB capacities. Its first
implementation of the technology,
however, will be in notebook drives.
The company says it’s already testing
a 2.5-inch 100GB drive.
Toshiba, for its part, plans to
incorporate the technology in the
1.8-inch drives it sells to Apple for
use in the iPod by this summer. This
could result in a slimmer 40GB iPod,
because the drives would use only one
platter (current 40GB iPods use two-
platter drives). Toshiba also plans to
introduce a dual-platter 80GB drive.
Perpendicular recording
technology isn’t as simple as it
sounds, though; and it presents a
whole new batch of engineering
problems for the propeller-heads to
work out. The primary challenge is
in fine-tuning the read/write drive
heads to accommodate the particles’
increased density. Hitachi says it has
achieved this by positioning the read/
write head to within 10 nanometers of
the platter. To put this in perspective,
10nm is roughly 1/10,000th the width
of a human hair.Image provided by Hitachi Global Storage