Transmeta Corporation decided to show the advantages they have over rivals at the last week’s Needham Growth Conference. The event happened just a few days before Transmeta announces its fourth quarter and Fiscal 2002 year results, so, it was just the right time to show the company’s potential if there is any potential, of course. At least, Mathew Perry, the CEO of this Santa Clara, California-based CPU developer believes that the huge success for the company is just around the corner.

Transmeta demonstrated the following table that represents the contrast between Transmeta processors and their rivals, as I read over here.

Transmeta Processors versus Rivals
	Long Battery Life	Low Maximum Power	High Performance	Low Cost
Transmeta
Intel
AMD
VIA Technologies
National Semiconductor

The table itself is rather strange: firstly, actual models of microprocessors are not shown, secondly, it is not clear why Transmeta decided to use a pie chart with only four segments (do they want to say that Transmeta’s Crusoe TM5800 is just 25% slower compared to Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz?), finally, sources of the information in the matrix are not indicated, just like the way they measured the performance and battery life.

If we even take the information from the table a bit more abstractly, we will for sure notice that there are some misleading facts there. Transmeta may be the leader in terms of long battery life and low power consumption, however, they definitely cannot boast with high performance due to the nature of their Code Morphing Software and with low cost of their products. I have no idea why they compare the Crusoe processors with the CPUs made by National Semiconductor. The latter are used in numerous niche devices and perform their tasks pretty well, while the target of Transmeta is the notebook market, therefore it is wrong for them to compare all chips in one abstract table.

Later this year Transmeta hopes to compete with Intel Pentium M (aka Banias) CPU with their Astro processor that is expected to consume just about 6.8W while running at 1.4GHz and offering significant performance gains over younger Crusoe brethrens. Transmeta said that these CPUs will cost $120 at launch in the third quarter this year, about two quarters later than Intel Pentium M chips.

Transmeta Corporation announces fourth quarter and fiscal 2002 financial results on Thursday, January 16th.