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Chip design house Transmeta cut President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Allen loose Tuesday, naming its present chair, Murray Goldman, to the additional position of CEO and elevating a board member to president.

The executive moves are the second reshuffling of the deck since March, when the company's founder, David Ditzel, gave up his role as CEO and moved to the chief technology officer spot.

Allen had held the CEO position for about 33 weeks, since replacing Ditzel on March 1. Allen also lost his president and chief operating officer roles, which are being taken over by Hugh Barnes, a director on Transmeta's board.

Earlier this week, Transmeta announced the newest member of the Crusoe family, the TM6000. However, that was somewhat shadowed by the delay of its Crusoe 5800.

Transmeta unveiled its power-saving Crusoe processors for notebook computers in January 2000 to much fanfare, after operating in stealth mode for years developing the technology. Much of the hype grew from the presence of Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux OS, as an engineer at Transmeta.

Continued Challenges

Intel countered Transmeta's assault with power-saving chips of its own soon after Transmeta's launch. While Transmeta won designs with Sony, Hitachi, and other Asian notebook makers, U.S. notebook makers have been hesitant to adopt Transmeta's chips. IBM bailed out of plans to use a Crusoe processor in a notebook in favor of an Intel chip.

The company's efforts to find greener pastures in the server market have been disappointing. Two start-up companies planning to build power-saving servers--FiberCycle and Rebel.com--are out of business in the wake of larger competitors like Compaq launching low-power servers using other processors.

Transmeta cut its revenue projections by up to 50 percent last week, attributing the drop to order reductions from Japanese companies in light of worsening economic conditions.

The initial public offering of Transmeta in November was seen as the potential savior of the downtrodden IPO market at the time. Issued at $21 per share, it climbed to $50 in its first week before falling fast over the next year. In the last hour of Tuesday trading on the Nasdaq, Transmeta shares traded at $2.31, up $0.06 for the day. Shares had been on the rise after the company announced a new Crusoe processor Monday that takes up one-third the space on a circuit board compared with previous models.

The company's board of directors made the executive changes "after carefully reviewing the company's recent performance," according to a statement.

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