Transmeta Licenses Low-Power Tech to Nvidia

[Dalo Harkin]

Transmeta said Thursday that the company had licensed its LongRun technology to Nvidia, providing the graphics chip maker access to low-power technology.

 

 

Nvidia will pay Transmeta $25M for a non-exclusive license to the technology, which includes both the LongRun and LongRun2 technologies.

Since bowing out of the chipset market in 2005 - a process it completed in 2007 - Transmeta has since focused almost exclusively on licensing its existing low-power technologies to other chip firms. In 2007, AMD invested $7.5M in the company. Later that year, Intel agreed to pay a one-time fee of $150M and $20M per year for five years to settle a patent suit.

"We are very pleased to have achieved this license agreement with Nvidia," said Les Crudele, president and chief executive of Transmeta, in a statement. "We believe that this agreement both illustrates the value of Transmeta's intellectual property and technologies to our industry and realizes for Transmeta stockholders an immediate return from the strategic licensure of our intellectual property rights."

Low-power technologies could be used in a variety of ways, both to improve Nvidia's mobile chipsets and graphics chips, as well as its handheld offerings and MIDs.Perhaps more importantly, the technology might be used as a counter for the thermal issues Nvidia recently experienced.

 

Transmeta Licenses Low-Power Tech to Nvidia - News and Analysis by PC Magazine