They released a couple processors with much lower performance than the market expected, shut that down, started licensing their IP to Intel, Nvidia, and others, and then got acquired.

i did get a sony picturebook with a transmeta processor. the problem was that as a consumer i didn't notice anything special about it. for transmeta to make it they would have had to either be cheaper or faster or use less power to be attractive for consumer devices.

I seem to recall them machines not being cheaper, which was my main hope at the time :)

i got mine as a gift, so i don't remember the price, but i don't think it was cheap. however that would not even bother me. they would have at least had to be cheaper for manufacturers to make it worth it to put them into more devices.

They had a great plan, that was promising, and Intel was focused entirely on the pentium-4, which had high clocks for bragging rights, long pipeline (related to the high clocks), and high power usage.

However between Transmeta's idea and shipping a product Intel's Israel location came up with the Intel Core series. MUCH more energy efficienct, much better performance per clock, and ideal for lower power platforms like laptops.

Sadly transmeta's no longer had a big enough advantage, sales decreased, and I heard many of the engineers ended up at Nvidia, which did use some of their ideas in a nvidia product.

> Sadly transmeta's no longer had a big enough advantage, sales decreased, and I heard many of the engineers ended up at Nvidia, which did use some of their ideas in a nvidia product.

Funny how that came about. Talent finds a way, Now they're all sitting in a 3T ship.-