Efficeon nets PC industry backing | ZDNet
Summary
Efficeon, to debut in notebooks later this year, is a key part of Transmetas attempt at a comeback, and of its ongoing efforts to create a niche for itself alongside AMD and Intel. When it launched in early 2000, the company promised that its Crusoe chips would tackle one of the major problems in notebook computing: short battery life caused by processor power consumption. The company struck deals with a number of Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers in fairly rapid succession and then held an initial public offering at the end of 2000. Then Intel began to pour more efforts into reducing power consumption, a push that culminated in the Centrino chips it released this past March. The chip will debut at over 1GHz and include HyperTransport, a fast chip-to-chip interconnect found on the Opteron processor from AMD that advocates say can boost computer performance.