Crusoe stranded by IBM

NEWS The company will continue to examine Transmeta technology, but there are no plans for Crusoe-powered notebooks in the near future, according to a company spokeswoman. Mario Morales, VP of semiconductors at research group IDC, said: "Some of the test results have shown that Transmeta does not do all it promised to do in terms of battery life. They still have momentum but need to prove themselves against Intel." Morales said Transmeta would be better off concentrating on niche areas like thin and light notebooks and information appliance markets. Transmeta was founded in 1995, and later drafted in open source guru and Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, to work on its flagship Crusoe processor. The company launched the chip in January, and Gateway-AOL was the first venture to sign up to use it. PC manufacturers Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC have also demonstrated hardware with Crusoe installed. Transmeta has announced it intends to float on Nasdaq within the next few weeks.