Ahead of its Q3 microprocessor launch, Transmeta Corp. continues its push into the embedded space, with a design win for its 1GHz Crusoe 5800 processor in Hewlett-Packard Co.’s thin client product line.

HP today launches its HP Compaq Thin Client t5700 device, positioned as a PC replacement device for the enterprise space that promises to boost ROI. Coupled with its recent strategy of pursuing design wins in the embedded space, Transmeta is positioning itself to take advantage of the renewed wave of IT spending that analysts see on the horizon. Transmeta expects the market for thin clients to grow at 30 percent annually.

“I think there is a large bubble of IT spending that over the course of two to three years will be spent,” said Mike DeNeffe, Transmeta’s director of marketing. “When everyone went into hibernation after the fateful Christmas season of 2000, a lot has happened between now and then. There are a lot of new wireless technologies, a lot of new hardware and software technologies.

“We made the conscious decision to attack the embedded systems and embedded industrial market. This is just another stepping stone in doing so, which signifies and verifies our strategy in these markets. What we want to do is provide a diverse foundation of businesses and segments that are applying our technology in their product.”

Thin clients could be referred to as the enterprise version of a Web pad. Rather than employing many desktops and workstations tied to a central server, thin clients are being positioned as an efficient alternative. The leaps in available technology over the last three years has now made this a realistic approach, DeNeffe said.

“The benefit of a thin client is the reduced total cost of ownership of a device that has essentially no moving parts and can be centralized in one location,” he added. “With the server doing all the work you can imagine what kind of ROI you’re going to get. Bandwidth is getting faster, so servers can download meaty applications to the thin clients quickly. The perception between a standard desktop in an enterprise situation and a thin client in an enterprise situation is close to being the same. When you’re not doing data intensive graphics, a thin client makes sense.”

HP is pitching its thin clients as a pseudo PC in a very small form factor with a small heatsink.

“The thin clients launched by HP are very high performance,” said Seamus Meagher, Transmeta’s products marketing manager for thin clients. “Agents are bringing applications on to the client side [rather than house these applications on a server or desktop]. For example they want to have a web browser, or localized Powerpoint presentations, or java development. The goal for HP was to get front of screen perception as close as possible to desktop like performance, so the user experience is not deteriorated at all.”

Transmeta’s next significant product introduction is expected to be its TM8000 ultra-low power processor for notebooks, codenamed Astro, due in Q3.

By: DocMemory
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