AMD trying to pull Transmeta out of woods?

A few months ago, I had written about the AMD- Raza deal,AMD selling off its Alchemy range to Raza and also stopping its Geode division, now it seems they did that to help Transmeta with their Crusoe and Efficeon family which where directly in contention with the formers' market. Now, they have gone a step further by granting a mammoth 7.5$ cash for preferred stock deal with Transmeta.

Transmeta was once one of the better processor manufacturers who were known for their low power processors, but lately are struggling int the market. Last year they posted a net loss of over 24$ million. They had to make amends by cutting over 39% of their employee strength and also concentrating more over lawsuits over intel on Intellectual property infringement. Maybe AMD felt they have to back Transmeta now, already AMD has lost a lot of money in 2007 Q1. As the saying goes, "Enemy's enemy becomes friend...".

Transmeta did not waste the oppurtunity to lavish praise on AMD, "AMD has long been a leader in the development and delivery of energy-efficient, high-performance computing technologies, standards and initiatives," stated Transmeta president and CEO Les Crudele. "Transmeta has been proud to endorse and contribute to those industry leading activities, and we look forward to continuing our collaboration with AMD on technology initiatives in the future."

In return AMD may hope to take advantage of energy-efficient Transmeta technology to their own advantage . AMD President and CEO Dirk Meyer claims, "Transmeta was a key ally in helping to bring our highly-successful AMD64 technology to market and has supported the widespread industry adoption of both AMD64 and AMD’s HyperTransport technology."
But I am not sure if there is going to be a repeat of the ATI merger, here.

Interesting note: Linus Trovalds was an employee of Transmeta once upon a time.

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Intel, AMD leave the mobile phone processor market

In early june this year AMD divested the whole non x86 processor line, Alchemy line of processors selling it to Raza microelectronics Inc. for an undisclosed sum. Though this does not mean complete sell off of its mobile processor sector, their presence is now restricted to support the RMI.
As if following the "green company", Intel later in the month announced that they will sell off the XScale PXAxxx applications and 3G baseband based processors for a speculated sum of $600 Million along existing liabilities, to a company called Marvell. This is seen as a strategic move by the Chip major. It was quoted Intel saying that it was to focus on its core x86 and wireless LAN chipset businesses.
This makes Marvell the single largest supplier of 3G and smartphone processors. However, Intel has reserved some fuel for the mobile, as they still hold the 4G range of processor technology with them.
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