That was my point - on kernel design, yes, he's way more qualified to comment than I am. But his claim was about CPU design, not kernel design. He's about as qualified to comment about CPU design as I am on kernel design.

He worked at Transmeta, after all.

Yes, that's what I said. Transmeta is out of business; all their clever ideas have nothing to show. It is entirely possible that a "competent CPU engineer" needs to make certain things absolutely work with high performance even if the cost is leaky side channels, and someone who worked at a failed CPU company does not know that because they never got to see their product succeed in the market.

Do you seriously think that winning the market equals being right? "The market" is a horribly ill-idealized model full of wrong assumptions. Uninformed customers, unfair practices and outright illegal behaviour need to be expected. "The market" is a very bad indicator as to who was right.

If the claim being made is "well obviously they should have just done foo and it would have worked," there's reason to believe that foo gives you a significantly less competitive product, and the speaker is not giving any evidence for why it's possible to do foo and still succeed in the market, the only thing we have to go on is the speaker's experience in that market.

A rigorous argument for why foo can be done and doesn't kill your product would be fine too, but this email doesn't even attempt to do that. What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.

Transmeta's IP, and its ideas, were gobbled up and put to good use when the company folded.

It was a clever microarchitecture; they just targeted the wrong consumer segment (breaking into x86 was nigh-impossible that late; chip internals on the other hand... =D)

...which is why AMD with just as good performance doesn’t have the same flaws.