Comment by rsynnott
12 hours ago
> But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms
I'm not sure that that's really correct; they were very desktop-oriented.
12 hours ago
> But they were still a technology company, and if their plans had gone well, they would have sold their product to dotcoms
I'm not sure that that's really correct; they were very desktop-oriented.
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.
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.