SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will reportedly use Transmeta Corp.'s code-morphing software to prototype its own forthcoming Sledgehammer chip, according to industry sources.
The agreement solidifies the relationship between the two companies, reported last August by Electronic Buyers' News. AMD president Hector Ruiz said then thatthe two companies were in talks concerning a technology exchange (see Aug. 22 story ).
Both AMD, Sunnyvale, and Transmeta, Santa Clara, could benefit by cooperating on a new processor aimed at the sub-$400 PC market, Ruiz said last August.
"We don't have a good feel for this market," Ruiz said at the time. "It is so fragmented with various proposed solutions that it's hard to pull our arms around it. Perhaps by looking at the market jointly with Transmeta, we can come to understand it better."
The exchange places the Transmeta Crusoe chip in the role of a programmable logic device, a commodity chip usually used for prototyping everything from game consoles to communications hubs and switches.
Currently, the AMD 64-bit Sledgehammer is itself little more than a prototype, a collection of software code that can be simulated on other chips before it is turned into silicon late in 2001.
While the 64-bit AMD "X86-64" software is said to be similar to the code that runs the 32-bit AMD Athlon and Intel Pentium 4 microprocessors, software developers face a chicken-and-egg problem: they must have a chip to write software for, but they need it before the chip itself has been created.
Sources said that the Transmeta "code-morphing" software will be used to ease the development process. Rival Intel Corp., on the other hand, has been able to fund the development of its own Itanium microprocessor by doing most of the development work itself. Some analysts also consider the first Itanium processor
to be merely a test product until a "real" Itanium chip, code-named McKinley, is released at a later date.
Transmeta may receive some details of the Sledgehammer in exchange, sources said, which could be used in future Transmeta processors. "But that's not the real point of the deal," a source said.
Sources at Transmeta Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., declined to comment on "speculation". Officials at AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif., couldn't be reached for comment
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