Transmeta up for sale

Posted at: 6:12pm 25th September 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Low-power processor designer announces that it’s in search of potential buyers

After giving up on the CPU manufacturing business in 2005, low-power CPU designer Transmeta has announced that it’s up for sale. In a statement, the processor company that brought us the mobile Crusoe and Efficeon series of CPUs said that it has ‘initiated a process to seek a potential sale of the Company.’

Transmeta claims that the move is intended to ‘enhance value’ for its stockholders, and that the decision is a result of ‘actively exploring a full range of strategic alternatives over the past few months and after strengthening its balance sheet.’ The announcement came straight after Transmeta reached a legal agreement with Intel over Transmeta’s intellectual property and patents, which includes Intel making a one-off payment of $91.5 million US to Transmeta before the end of this month, as well as annual payments of $20 million US every year from 2009 through 2013.

Transmeta’s president and CEO, Les Crudele, said that ‘receiving these one-time payments strengthens our balance sheet and allows potential buyers to more accurately evaluate our Company.’ He also added that ‘we expect that our intellectual property portfolio and licensing business, combined with our solid balance sheet, will be attractive to potential bidders, and we look forward to conducting a timely process to maximise value for our stockholders.’

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Transmeta’s work. The Transmeta Crusoe was one of the first CPU architectures designed specifically for the low-power laptop market, with minimal power requirements and very little heat output. However, there was a catch, which was that the Crusoe’s native instruction set was VLIW (very long instruction word), and could only process x86 instructions with an x86 emulation layer on top. This, along with using system memory for cache, made the CPU comparatively slow when compared to Intel and AMD’s mobile CPUs.

The company ceased production of processors in 2005, and now makes money from licensing its intellectual property and patents to third parties.