Transmeta Dubs New Line 'Efficeon'; Seeks To Grow White-Box Sales

Mike DeNeffe, director of marketing at Transmeta, said Efficeon will ship to OEMs this quarter and be available on the market in the fourth quarter. He also noted the recent brisk growth of sales in the custom-built "white book" segment, and said that Santa Clara, Calif.-based Transmeta is seeking a place in that space.

"We do want to enter the white-box notebook market," DeNeffe said. "It's growth, and the fact [is] that in the market, manufacturers are looking for interesting technology they can innovate with, and have competitive advantages against the mainstream stuff."

The company officially unveiled the new brand name for its next-gen processor Tuesday. Chip specifications and pricing plans were not immediately available.

DeNeffe said the company is currently evaluating different go-to-market strategies into white-box channels in the United States, Europe and Asia--including marketing incentives not currently offered by rival chip makers.

A white-box market play by Transmeta could provide a needed boost at the right time for the chip company. CRN' s Monthly Solution Provider surveys have indicated brisk white-box market share growth in the notebook space. Chip giant Intel, also based in Santa Clara, Calif., has targeted the U.S. white-box market as a top priority for its Centrino platform.

To date, Hewlett-Packard has stood alone among U.S.-based PC makers that have built systems on Transmeta processors, using Transmeta's Crusoe chips in its line of Tablet PCs and thin clients. Most of Transmeta's OEM customers have been based in Asia.

While the vendor is billing the Efficeon as a processor that will offer performance and efficiency improvements over processors now on the market--including the Crusoe--DeNeffe said "apples-to-apples" benchmarks or other quantifiers were not immediately available.