[hinkley]

Would TSMC be further along today, or not, if Transmeta had been thought up five, ten years later? Would Transmeta be farther along for having encountered a more mature TSMC?

TSMC seems to have made a lot of bones on Arm and Apple’s time.

[vlovich123]

No, Transmeta was never a big or significant player. ARM was started in 1985 and Apple was an early meaningful investor. By the turn of the millennium ARM was already well established in the microcontroller, PDA and cell phone space (smartphone and feature phone). Ten years later you already had the iPhone well established. It was just never going to happen for them. TSMC made bones on being a fabricator for all sorts of custom chip designs. It almost didn’t matter who it was as long as there was increasing volume.