Taiwan manufacturers lapping up Crusoe chip

Will Knight ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 21 Feb 2000 13:24 GMT

Innovative new chip company Transmeta revealed on Monday that the whole of the mobile Taiwanese computer manufacturing industry is in the process of "standardising" on its debut microprocessor, the Crusoe, as well as the enhanced Mobile Linux operating system.

Jim Chapman, Transmeta vice president of marketing, told a news briefing in London that Taiwan, which makes many of the world's PCs, had rushed to adopt the company's low-power Crusoe chips using the Mobile Linux operating system.

"The entire island of Taiwan is standardising on these mobile devices using Mobile Linux and Crusoe," he said.

He said he expected announcements soon from manufacturers of products that would be available as soon as mid-year.

Chief executive of the Silicon Valley startup, Dave Ditzel, was unwilling to name names but said that some of its customers may reveal hardware using Crusoe at CeBIT in Germany this week. He said all the relevant companies in Taiwan are "doing designs" using Crusoe technology.

Ditzel also discussed publicly details of the Mobile Linux operating system for the first time saying he believes it will become the standard for mobile Internet devices, ahead of Symbian.

At the same time, Ditzel paid tribute to the European developers behind the software innovations of the Crusoe family of processors. Vice president of sales and marketing, James Chapman, described the European market as "substantial", and somewhere the company is keen to get its message across.

Ditzel did not rule out the possibility of Crusoe chips being ported to mobile phone devices sometime in the future but said the company is concentrating on laptops and mobile Internet devices currently. The technology could even be ported to non-X86 hardware architectures including the Apple Macintosh, according to Ditzel.

Reuters contributed to this story

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