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Comment by 0x0aff374668 | Hacker News Reader

Kinda reminds me of Transmeta. Except they had a product, a shitty one, but a product. Or Ampere, but they only have one product they inherited and no flashy names.

Silicon startup challenges are rough. RISC-V is probably the best hope for a new architecture (hint: its not a new architecture).

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Transmeta was going to be the next big thing, code morphing! Linus was on board. News on slashdot every day! And then ... some product released but no needle moved. I wonder if they built something that got outpaced by intel, needed network effects to take off that never materialized, were ahead of their time, or just no market for their product?

These guys seem like they’ve identified a market and who their first customers are going to be.

Sort of... Transmeta was basically a VLIW chip optimized to recompile x86 code. The problem was by that point all x86 chips (even plucky little VIA/Centaur!) were recompiling x86 instructions into RISC-ish ones, and without sucking up RAM and more importantly memory bandwidth to do it.

So even if the VLIW chip was on paper more powerful/efficient (and I'm not sure it was), it just couldn't keep up with doing it in hardware.

Well, this new company seems to be about building servers (probably with custom mainboards?) with existing chips and open firmware.

Would be fun if they used Ampere :) but my guess would be that the first products at least are gonna be Corebooted Intel platforms.

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