Transmeta's Crusoe
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Authors
Authors: Ravi Madapati
Faculty Member
ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research).
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The Road Ahead
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Transmeta had sought to carve out a niche in the mobile processor market with a low-power Crusoe chip that had been popular in the notebooks sold to users in Asia, notably Japan, but had failed to capture a significant market share in the US and Europe. One of the newer versions of Crusoe powered Hewlett-Packard's Tablet PC, which was announced earlier in 2003. Transmeta hoped the worldwide market for embedded devices would help Transmeta go beyond its traditional geographic strongholds. Thus, in early 2003 the company shifted its focus to embedded systems. It released six new processors for embedded systems such as point-of-sale terminals and industrial automation devices, focusing on an energy-efficient design that alleviated the need for a cooling fan within the device. Three different clock speeds were available for the new Crusoe Special Embedded processors: 667 MHz, 800 MHz, and 933 MHz, with standard-power and low power models available at each speed. Transmeta also started building several security features into its chips for the first time. These included an encryption engine and the ability to store digital certificates and encryption keys. |
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The addition of the security features aimed at enabling notebook makers build machines that made their owners' passwords and other data more resistant to theft. Transmeta envisioned the security features being used mainly to protect data for notebooks used on wireless networks. Transmeta's approach set it apart from its major competitor, Intel. By building in encryption, Transmeta was essentially giving away security features for free with its processors. To add security to computers with Intel chips, companies typically used separate security chips or added security software, which was easier to thwart than hardware.
To date, Intel had offered encryption features built into chipsets-which were chips that handled data in a PC-but not its processors. Extra chips added costs and design complexity to computers, Transmeta argued, even if the additional costs were small. Transmeta chips that included the new technologies would go on sale in large volume to computer makers starting in the second half of 2003. Meanwhile, Transmeta was also working on a new chip for notebooks. The chip, code-named Astro, not only promised lower power consumption than the Crusoe family of processors but also better performance.