Transmeta licenses Longrun and [other] technology to Nvidia

[Humus]

Interesting. Perhaps we'll see the market turn into a three player game, with Intel, AMD and Nvidia all delivering complete platforms, including x86. I wouldn't be too surprised. Although I would have guessed Nvidia would turned to Via for the x86.

 

[Arun]

Would an x86-license (apart from this deal!) be royalty-free or would Nvidia have to buy a license from Intel?

The point of Transmeta's architecture is that it uniquely seems to escape from the license requirement.

Although I would have guessed Nvidia would turned to Via for the x86.

Well the advantage of going to Transmeta would be that it'd be a much much cheaper option (Via might cost upwards of $1B for a loss-making business!) but the obvious disadvantage is that their technology is inferior to VIA; the C7 is roughly the same performance but it's much smaller/cheaper, and the Nano is more expensive but much faster. heh.

 

[_xxx_]

Can Transmeta IP do other things good besides the x86 emulation? Is there anything else in there that could stand on it's own as a computing platform eventually?

 

[CarstenS]

The point of Transmeta's architecture is that it uniquely seems to escape from the license requirement.

Code-Morphing stuff on a not-x86-arch? Wouldn't this be an excellent proof-of-concept case for CUDA?

Not that I think that this might be worth anywhere the 25M $, but maybe they can (or already do?...) use some of the stuff in Tegra.

 

[hoom]

I sort of got the impression that part of the Transmeta vs. Intel settlement included Transmeta not making their x86 stuff anymore? (presumably including not onselling the tech?)