What is it about Transmeta CEO Dave Ditzel that makes you want to believe him? Maybe it's the way he unabashedly uses words like "cool" and "neat." Maybe it's because he had the audacity to build his upstart chip company within view of Intel headquarters. Maybe it's because he never completes a sentence, so enthusiastic is he about Crusoe, his company's brand of microprocessors. From last January, when Crusoe was announced in a blaze of fanfare, until mid-August, when the company filed to go public, Ditzel made himself hoarse pushing the Crusoe chip. Whether in front of 200 engineers or a single reporter, his message was unflagging: Crusoe-the Intel-compatible chip with one-tenth the power requirements of a Pentium III-is going to change the world of computing forever. "Crusoe is low-power, it's compatible and it's high-performance," he said in one of a series of interviews held before the August filing. "That's our mantra."

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