Well, they ended up being mobile-oriented, but even that didn’t work. They were definitely not server-oriented and they really couldn’t compete at desktop. Honestly, while the tech was interesting, it wasn’t really solving a problem that anyone was struggling with.
> it wasn’t really solving a problem that anyone was struggling with
They did push the envelope on efficiency. My Crusoe-equipped laptop could go six hours on the stock battery (12+ on the extended batteries) back when most laptops struggled to get three.
Yes, but wasn’t most of that because its performance was low? If you had dialed back the performance of an equivalent Pentium (model whatever was current at that time), would it have been in the same power ballpark?
Transmeta did try to enter the server market. There was a company called RLX Technologies that wanted to use Crusoe chips in blade servers. I remember them demoing a 3U rack server w/ 24 blades in it. 1 CPU per blade.
They probably would have worked well as server processor, because they were pretty energy efficient, but they were slow the first time a program was run, but sped up after caching the translation. Most servers run the same software over and over again, so they could have been competitive.
It would have been an extremely difficult time to enter the market though, because at the time Intel was successfully paying server manufacturers to not offer superior competing products.
