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."

This summer, the company and Ditzel went silent for the quiet period that follows every initial public offering. But by then the Crusoe message had developed a life of its own: Not since the Apple iMac had there been such a fuss in Silicon Valley like the one Crusoe has brought ashore. It's no surprise that Valley insider rags Upside and Red Herring ran Transmeta as their cover stories last spring, but before the quiet period began, Ditzel was also quoted in Time, USA Today and a horde of other consumer publications. Transmeta's publicity efforts have fed in part on the company's hiring of Linux author and open-source software guru Linus Torvalds. Torvalds has been part of the software design team at Transmeta, and has lately been working on a version of Linux that will complement Crusoe's application in the exploding market for mobile devices.