One of Silicon Valley's most secretive start-ups may be working on an innovative microprocessor that can run multiple operating systems and all the software programs that they support.
On 3 November, the US Patent and Trademark office issued a patent to Transmeta, one of the Valley's most closely watched technology companies, and the object of enormous speculation.
"[The patent] appears to be [for] a processor that's able to, on-the-fly, translate the instruction set of a second processor," said Steve Gribble, a graduate student researcher at UC Berkeley's Computer Science division. "What that basically means is given enough software support, it could run programs from multiple types of computers."
Transmeta employs a number of chip and software pioneers, including CEO David Ditzel, who formerly worked at Sun on its SPARC microprocessors, and Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux operating system. The company is financed in part by billionaire Paul Allen.
Transmeta representatives could not be reached for comment on Friday. Gribble and other participants in developer discussion forums on the Net think that the patent might be a red herring, meant to throw off competitors such as Intel.
If Transmeta's product really delivers what the highly detailed patent says it will, we'll one day be looking at a fast and flexible "one size fits all" processor.
In the computing world, the ability to imitate another architecture is known as emulation. But emulators are notoriously slow. A Macintosh application, for example, can mimic the Windows OS, but at a glacial pace. It's not really effective for everyday computing because the emulation is handled at the software application level -- which spells slow programs.
The technological claims contained in the Transmeta patent suggest that the company's chip will emulate any number of other processors at much higher speeds.
