AMD punts on Transmeta energy technology

CHIP-maker AMD has invested US$7.5 million in ailing semiconductor design firm Transmeta in a deal thought to be aimed at securing energy efficiency technology.

Founded in 1995, Transmeta develops and licenses innovative computing, microprocessor and semiconductor technologies and related intellectual property. The company is a specialist in delivering low power, high performance chip technology.

Most recently Transmeta has focused on developing and licensing our advanced power management technologies.

“We are very pleased that AMD has made a strategic investment in the future of Transmeta,” said Transmeta president and chief executive officer, Les Crudele.

“AMD has long been a leader in the development and delivery of energy-efficient, high-performance computing technologies, standards and initiatives,” Mr Crudele said.

“Transmeta has been proud to endorse and contribute to those industry leading activities, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration with AMD on technology initiatives in the future,” he said.

AMD president and chief operating officer Dirk Meyer said Transmeta has been a key AMD ally in bring the company’s AMD64 technology to market and had supported the industry adoption of both AMD64 and AMD's HyperTransport technology.

“Our investment will support Transmeta's technology development work and AMD's efforts to leverage Transmeta's innovative energy-efficient technologies to the benefit of AMD's customers,” Mr Meyer said.

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AMD confirms Quad-Core for August

CHIP giant Advanced Micro Devices has confirmed it will ship its first Quad-Core Opteron “Barcelona” processors in August – scotching rumours that it planned to delay the launch.

There had been industry speculation that AMD would put the launch date back because of unspecified manufacturing problems. The processors are code-named “Barcelona”.

AMD said it would start shipping both standard and low-power versions in August. The company said it was the first time AMD had ever made standard and low power versions of a product available at launch.

With the new processors shipping in volume in August, the company said it expects hardware partners to start shipping system products based on Barcelona in September.

Barcelona is the first x86 processor to integrate four processing cores onto a single piece of silicon. AMD says the development would deliver significant performance and performance-per-watt enhancements over existing architectures.

“More than ever before, customers are expecting energy-efficiency and performance-per-watt leadership as much as absolute performance,” AMD’s Server and Workstation Division corporate vice-president Randy Allen said.

“With this new reality of computing, greater performance at the expense of greater power consumption is no longer an option.”

“AMD has prioritised production of our low power and standard power products because our customers and ecosystem demand it, and we firmly believe that the introduction of our native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor will deliver on the promise of the highest levels of performance-per-watt the industry has ever seen.”

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