..Say it ain't so, Luke Watching the watchers watch Transmeta Transmeta, the Silicon Valley company that employs Linus Torvalds, isn't saying what kind of technology it's working on. (Their Web site says, succinctly if paradoxically, "This web page is not here yet.") The Red Herring tried to find out what they are up to -- or perhaps their account of the attempt, "Stalking Transmeta," [17] is all in good fun. PC Magazine prints a more substantial guess [18]: In the NY Times for 8/31, John Markoff relays a rumor [19] that he says has some Sili Valley techies quite upset. Markoff's article is mostly about evidence of increasing strain in the "Wintel" alliance. One factor contributing to the wobble is the rapid growth of technology areas such as telephony and personal digital assistants that do not use Intel hardware or Microsoft software. Microsoft has an entrant at this end of the market -- Windows CE -- but Intel is seen as concentrating in- creasingly on the shrinking top end. (Its purchase of Digital's StrongArm technology may have been reduced in value by the defec- tion of key technical talent.) If Transmeta, which was founded by a former Sun Sparc architect, is working on a platform for portable computing -- let's call it a "media chip" [20] -- what OS will it run? Well, with Linus on board, you would assume the answer would be "Linux, duh." Some flavor of Java would certainly be a contender. But Markoff says the word is that Transmeta may run Microsoft software. A hardware designer is quoted thus: [17] http://www.herring.com/mag/issue58/stalking.html [18] http://www.zdnet.com/pcmag/features/cpu98/intro10.html [19] http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/08/biztech/articles/31chip.html [20] http://www.techweb.com/se/directlink.cgi?EET19980706S0069 ____________________________________________ TBTF home and archive at http://www.tbtf.com/ . To subscribe send the message "subscribe" to tbtf-request(a)world.std.com. TBTF is Copyright 1994-1998 by Keith Dawson, <dawson(a)world.std.com>om>. Com- mercial use prohibited. For non-commercial purposes please forward, post, and link as you see fit.