AMD Is Buying Transmeta Piece by Piece

AMD and Transmeta are becoming more and more bonded it seems, as the well-known CPU producer invests again in the energy-efficient chip company. Lately, Transmeta has been battling decreased revenues and higher losses, but with no apparent success, as it faced delisting from the Nasdaq stock market because of its low share price, as cited from here.

In the late 1990, Transmeta was doing good and it was famous. It was developing a new, very low power processor for notebooks, but its Crusoe line did not sell too well because of repeated delays and poor performance. With only a few licensing deals secured, mostly in Japan, the company faced heavy losses and had to cut back jobs in 2005. Later that year, Transmeta sold its Crosoe line to a Hong Kong company for $15 million in cash.

The current AMD-Transmeta deal is not the first of its kind, as last year AMD sold chips to Microsoft Transmeta and for a while, the things were looking bright again. But in March, the company was at its lowest point again. As AMD bought stock from Transmeta, things start looking up, more so since the CPU producer said that Transmeta is „an innovative force in the industry" and it helped AMD to develop the technology behind AMD64 and the HyperTransport technology. Dirk Meyer, president of AMD said in a statement that they "will support Transmeta's technology development work" and that he considers that AMD's efforts are designed to "leverage Transmeta's innovative energy-efficient technologies to the benefit of AMD's customers".

Les Crudele, president and chief executive of Transmeta, said that they are "very pleased that AMD has made a strategic investment in the future of Transmeta" and that his company looks forward in continuing its collaboration with AMD in developing new technologies.

Last month, in a regulatory filing, Transmeta announced that David Ditzel, the company's co-founder and first CEO was resigning from the board of directors, but that he would continue to do consulting work until June 2008.