Transmeta heeft een nieuw patent aangevraagd dat verband lijkt te houden met de mysterieuze processor die ze daar volgens geruchten in ontwikkeling hebben. De beschrijving van het patent ligt een tipje van de sluier op. Hier een stukje copy/paste uit een nieuwsartikel van The Register:
Another patent granted to Transmeta seems to have established what the mysterious outfit is up to pretty clearly. Briefly, the company's processor is intended to be faster than anything built using current technology, and to be able to run any of the operating software for any existing processors - faster than the original.This of course sounds like complete hokum, but Transmeta has the patent, US Patent Office number 5,958,061, and the application, which can be read here, explains in some detail how the company proposes to achieve this. Transmeta claims: "The present invention overcomes the problems of the prior art and provides a microprocessor which is faster than microprocessors of the prior art, is capable of running all of the software for all of the operating systems which may be run by a large number of families of prior art microprocessors, yet is less expensive than prior art microprocessors."
The mechanisms described in this patent tally closely with those outlined in a previous Transmeta patent (Transmeta reveals radical new chip design). Transmeta won't be using "a microprocessor with more complicated hardware to accelerate its operation," but instead will be combining a hardware processing portion it refers to as a "morph host" and an emulating software portion, "code morphing software." These two, the company claims, will work together as a microprocessor "with more capabilities than any known competitive microprocessor."
