That was the message last week when two PC-market players, Transmeta Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) and Via Technologies Inc. (Taipei, Taiwan), announced significant moves into the embedded market. The two differ on technology and strategy, but both are motivated by what they see as looming opportunity.

Transmeta's moves last week were just the latest in a strategy that began to unfold last year with the introduction of the Crusoe SE, according to director of systems marketing John Heinlein. Now the company is going further and addressing the needs of embedded applications with new processors, the TM5700 and TM5900.

Like their parent TM5800, the chips integrate north-bridge functionality, but in new, smaller packages. The company is also rolling out a series of reference platforms with resources and form factors tuned to the needs of thin clients and firewalls, which Transmeta sees as borderline embedded applications. It is also drawing a bead on the embedded printer market.

"There's a number of applications that used to be clearly embedded, and used to get by quite well on a traditional embedded processor," Heinlein explained. "Today, they are adding user-interface complexity, supporting a fuller range of applications [and] in some cases adding full Windows functionality. That is certainly the case in devices that are growing up out of the PDA market, for instance."

Transmeta's strategy is to bring its embedded-applications expertise to such devices. In effect, the company is developing a family of general-purpose computing platforms with X86 compatibility, a variety of PC-level and embedded operating-system choices and embedded form factors.

That contrasts sharply with the strategy at Via, which last week announced the formation of an Embedded Platform Division. Via sees opportunity on both sides of the divide: on one side, in the explosion of diversity in form factors and specialization in functionality for PC-like devices; and on the other, in burgeoning markets for telematics, gaming devices, media centers and other clearly non-PC boxes.

The new division will at first bring tuned versions of Via's existing strengths in "light" X86 processors, core logic and mainboards to mine these opportunities. But Timothy Chen, special assistant to the president at Via, said there would be much more to the effort than this. "These markets will eventually require not just PC solutions but their own SoC [system-on-chip] designs," Chen stated. "They will also require significant assistance in application-level software development. And in some cases, they will find that X86 processors are not the best answer to their needs. The charter of our division is to serve these customers wherever their needs take us, not just with a spin-off of our personal-computing product lines."

The significant difference in strategy between the two companies may reflect a difference in resources or perspective. Transmeta, firmly rooted in Silicon Valley, primarily serves big, technically powerful customers such as HP, Sony and Sharp, which are more than capable of looking out for their own applications development.

But Via looks West, not East, into a blossoming no man's land in which each emerging company has an idea to serve a need, but lacks the deep pockets and massive development resources of the giants. That results in a very different view of how much support is necessary to serve the embedded market.

History may be on the side of Transmeta's strategy of supporting the big guys. But a future, concentrated market may make a difference. "I think we may see in a few years that it is no longer a global market at all-most of the companies will be concentrated in Taiwan and in China," Via's Chen said.

By: DocMemory
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