Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen has often avoided courting publicity for many of the network of technology and research companies he’s helped to set up and fund, lending those companies a certain mystique. Transmeta Corp, of Santa Clara, California, one such company, has been rumored to be in the Intel-compatible chip cloning business (CI No 3,163), but little has been heard of it since it was founded late in 1995. On the web site devoted to Paul Allen’s investments (http://www.paulallen.com/) it is listed as a company whose primary business is alternative VLSI engines for multimedia PCs. Elsewhere it’s been described as a fabless semiconductor company. The only other facts generally known about Transmeta, which maintains a stony silence against all enquiries, are that its chief executive officer is industry veteran David Ditzel, a RISC chip pioneer and former director of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Sparc chip research efforts, and that last year it managed to lure Linux author Linus Torvalds away from the University of Helsinki to work there. Torvalds apparently only agreed to go under the provision that he could still work on Linux-related projects. The lack of any further facts hasn’t stopped online magazine Salon writing up a full length article on the company this month, filled out with references to Thomas Pynchon and an account of author Andrew Leonard creeping round the outside of the company’s Santa Clara, California headquarters, where all he found was a low-slung stucco-roofed office building with impenetrably dark floor-to ceiling windows.
