Comment by btilly
9 hours ago
I don't either. Even with their problems, they didn't miss by much.
One key factor against them, though, is that they were facing a company whose long-term CEO had written Only The Paranoid Survive. At that point he had moved from being the CEO to the chairman of the board. But Intel had paranoia about possible existential threats baked into its DNA.
There is no question that Intel recognized Transmeta as a potential existential threat, and aggressively went after the very low-power market that Transmeta was targeting. Intel quickly created SpeedStep, allowing power consumption to dynamically scale when not under peak demand. This improved battery life on laptops using the Pentium III, without sacrificing peak performance. They went on to produce low power chips like the Pentium M that did even better on power.
Granted, Intel never managed to match the low power that Transmeta had. But they managed to limit Transmeta enough to cut off their air supply - they couldn't generate the revenue needed to invest enough to iterate as quickly as they needed to. This isn't just a story of Transmeta stumbling. This is also a story of Intel recognizing and heading off a potential threat.
I always found it ironic that Intel benignly neglected the mobile CPU/SoC market and also lost their process lead despite this supposed culture of never underestimating the competition. The paranoid Intel of the 80s/90s is clearly not the one that existed going into the 2000s and 2010's
Intel missed mobile, graphics, and AI, while failing to deliver 10nm, and it was all self-inflicted. They didn't understand what was coming. Transmeta was an easily identified threat to Intel's core CPU products so Intel was more likely to pull out all the stops with above-board competing on product as well as IP infringement and tortious interference. Intel had good risk management in having a team working on evolutions of P6, if that hadn't already been a going concern (see also Timna) coming up with a competitive product in the early 2000s would have been much harder.