This Santa Clara, CA company and its new Crusoe chip are attracting some of the best and the brightest minds in computing. So what exactly has Transmeta been up to, and how did they get Linus Torvalds to work for them?
But in January of this year, the veil was lifted, and the true story of Transmeta and what exactly they’re doing with Torvalds could be told.
It turns out that a major chapter in the story occurred in Seattle, where, three years ago, Transmeta CEO David Ditzel found himself pitching his vision for a whole new kind of computer chip to one of the founders of Microsoft, Corp., Paul Allen. It was 1997,and Ditzel was two years into a journey that could be traced back to a fundamental revelation he had while on leave from his job at Sun Microsystems. Ditzel saw the need for a clean slate in the development of computer chips.
In Allen’s small conference room perched above a 50-seat luxury theatre, David Ditzel was doing most of the talking, explaining how his chip would change the industry. He found avid listeners in the former Microsoft executive and his venture-capital scout Kevin Doren, who was also at the meeting.
Ditzel was nervous. Was Allen getting his message? It was not an easy one to grasp. About two-thirds of the way into the presentation, Allen began to smile and to laugh slightly to himself. All eyes turned to him. Allen recalled that at the start of the previous era — when Microsoft…
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