Transmeta threw a great party last night at the Rockefeller Center. Lots of nifty Crusoe-based gadgets were on display, including the OQO Ultra-Personal Computer . It wants to be a universal engine that powers your desktop, detaches and docks into a notebook, or stands alone as a somewhat portly PDA. Everybody wanted one, including me -- and I'm not known for gadget lust.
I spent a few minutes chatting with Dave Ditzel , who I embarrassingly did not recognize at first as being Transmeta's CTO (and marketing VP, of all things), and of course one of the gods of RISC. It was Dave who wrote the copy that was hidden in Transmeta's original teaser web page. We talked a bit about Green Destiny, the Transmeta-powered Beowulf cluster covered in Tuesday's New York Times story on supercomputing . According to this IDG News story by Ashlee Vance , the concept did not meet with universal acclaim:
Several scientists here did not share the enthusiasm for Green Destiny, however. Los Alamos, after all, is the home to several massive supercomputers that take up entire floors of buildings and require several cooling systems shaped like mini-nuclear reactors to keep them running. These "real" supercomputers handle serious work, and some of the people running them consider Green Destiny a joke. One scientist walked out of Feng's presentation, making his feelings clear.
That's OK. When you make a paradigm shift, you have to expect some gears to grind.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/06/27.html#a319