News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence. Parent comment

Re:Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence by generatorguy on Monday December 02, 2019 @03:42PM (#21686653)
Transmeta was going to be the next big thing, code morphing! Linus was on board. News on slashdot every day! And then ... some product released but no needle moved. I wonder if they built something that got outpaced by intel, needed network effects to take off that never materialized, were ahead of their time, or just no market for their product?

These guys seem like they’ve identified a market and who their first customers are going to be.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Oxide Computer Company: Initial boot sequence by happycube on Monday December 02, 2019 @03:56PM (#21686824)
Sort of... Transmeta was basically a VLIW chip optimized to recompile x86 code. The problem was by that point all x86 chips (even plucky little VIA/Centaur!) were recompiling x86 instructions into RISC-ish ones, and without sucking up RAM and more importantly memory bandwidth to do it.

So even if the VLIW chip was on paper more powerful/efficient (and I'm not sure it was), it just couldn't keep up with doing it in hardware.

[ Parent | on HN ]