in 1997 Intel was terrified of Transmeta, and it lit a fire under their ass to get the Celeron out more quickly...
Me and a colleague worked a F-ton to test out not only the Celeron, AGP, SIMD, OpenGL, Unreal Engine, and all the latest games...
But Intel paid the game devs a Million Marketing bucks if they would optimize their games (and general software) to the SIMD instructions, to make the game feel more subjectively responsive on the Celeron as opposed to the AMD, and the seemingly incoming Transmeta.
so I think that Transmeta was the big blunder, but in reverse ; ; Intel should have been all over gaming, and not been afraid of some plucky startup...
But recall all the senior engineers at intel from <1995 had slide rules and pocket protectors.... they didnt see the entertainment wave of computing early enough and made far too many mistakes and tried to catch up.... personally, I think Linux saved Intel from bankruptcy.
Transmeta was attractive to embedded HW developers because it had a PCI host controller built in, you didn't need a separate northbridge chip, the speed was less important.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/arm-shares-tumble-as-transmeta...
in 1997 Intel was terrified of Transmeta, and it lit a fire under their ass to get the Celeron out more quickly...
Me and a colleague worked a F-ton to test out not only the Celeron, AGP, SIMD, OpenGL, Unreal Engine, and all the latest games...
But Intel paid the game devs a Million Marketing bucks if they would optimize their games (and general software) to the SIMD instructions, to make the game feel more subjectively responsive on the Celeron as opposed to the AMD, and the seemingly incoming Transmeta.
so I think that Transmeta was the big blunder, but in reverse ; ; Intel should have been all over gaming, and not been afraid of some plucky startup...
But recall all the senior engineers at intel from <1995 had slide rules and pocket protectors.... they didnt see the entertainment wave of computing early enough and made far too many mistakes and tried to catch up.... personally, I think Linux saved Intel from bankruptcy.