Montalvo Systems

Last updated

Montalvo Systems was a Silicon Valley start-up reportedly working on an asymmetrical, x86 capable processor similar to the Cell microprocessor. The processor was to use high-performance cores for performance-intensive threads, and delegate minor tasks to the simpler cores to save silicon and power. [1] Matt Perry, former Transmeta CEO, served as CEO and president of Montalvo; Peter Song, founder of failed x86 manufacturer MemoryLogix, served as chief architect. Greg Favor (former NexGen/AMD) was responsible for chip microarchitecture and Carlos Puchol (former architect for power management at Transmeta and Nvidia) was system and power architect. Another founding member, Kevin Lawton, of bochs (x86 emulation) and plex86 (x86 virtualization) fame, was the processor simulator architect.

Contents

The official description of business from Montalvo's security filings [2] was:

A fabless semiconductor company developing ultra low-power system-on-chips for mobile devices.

As of 24 April 2008, Sun Microsystems had acquired the company's assets for an undisclosed sum. [3]

Locations

Headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, next door to the remnants of Transmeta, and nearby to Intel and Sun. It had offices in Boulder, Colorado and Bangalore, India. According to news reports, it had close to 300 employees.

In March 2008 news broke that Montalvo was seeking funds to avoid shutdown. [4] According to a news article released on March 31, Montalvo had laid off two-thirds of its engineers. At the same time, rumors surfaced that Sun Microsystems was in talks to buy Montalvo. [5] About three weeks later, on 24 April 2008, The Register confirmed the rumors to be true. [3]

Finances

From the Cal-EASI database, [2] the following information is available about Montalvo's financing.

DateTypeAmountNotes
2005-05-03Series A$1,997,751.36non-money, assumption of previous company's financing?
2005-05-03Series A$4,548,247.70
2005-10-11Warrants$302,000.00
2005-10-24Series A$9,548,247.70
2006-03-10Series B$26,299,998.53
2007-08-29Bridge$11,607,573.06subordinated convertible promissory notes
2007-12-17Bridge$20,000,000.00subordinated convertible promissory notes / warrants

News

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD</span> American semiconductor company

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., commonly abbreviated as AMD, is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyrix 6x86</span> Microprocessor

The Cyrix 6x86 is a line of sixth-generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed and released by Cyrix in 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM and SGS-Thomson. The 6x86 was made as a direct competitor to Intel's Pentium microprocessor line, and was pin compatible. During the 6x86's development, the majority of applications performed almost entirely integer operations. The designers foresaw that future applications would most likely maintain this instruction focus. So, to optimize the chip's performance for what they believed to be the most likely application of the CPU, the integer execution resources received most of the transistor budget. This would later prove to be a strategic mistake, as the popularity of the P5 Pentium caused many software developers to hand-optimize code in assembly language, to take advantage of the P5 Pentium's tightly pipelined and lower latency FPU. For example, the highly anticipated first-person shooter Quake used highly optimized assembly code designed almost entirely around the P5 Pentium's FPU. As a result, the P5 Pentium significantly outperformed other CPUs in the game.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Intel</span> American multinational corporation and technology company

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Itanium</span> Family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors

Itanium is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel. Launched in June 2001, Intel initially marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. In the concept phase, engineers said "we could run circles around PowerPC, that we could kill the x86." Early predictions were that IA-64 would expand to the lower-end servers, supplanting Xeon, and eventually penetrate into the personal computers, eventually to supplant RISC and complex instruction set computing (CISC) architectures for all general-purpose applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Microsystems</span> American computer company, 1982–2010

Sun Microsystems, Inc., was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and Innotek GmbH, creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center.

x86 Family of instruction set architectures

x86 is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of Intel's 8-bit 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486 processors. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wintel</span> Partnership between Microsoft Windows and Intel

Wintel is the partnership of Microsoft Windows and Intel producing personal computers using Intel x86-compatible processors running Microsoft Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyrix</span> American microprocessor developer

Cyrix Corporation was a microprocessor developer that was founded in 1988 in Richardson, Texas, as a specialist supplier of floating point units for 286 and 386 microprocessors. The company was founded by Tom Brightman and Jerry Rogers.

Transmeta Corporation was an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California. It developed low power x86 compatible microprocessors based on a VLIW core and a software layer called Code Morphing Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transmeta Crusoe</span>

The Transmeta Crusoe is a family of x86-compatible microprocessors developed by Transmeta and introduced in 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mobile processor</span>

A mobile processor is a microprocessor designed for mobile devices such as laptops, and cell phones.

Walter Jeremiah Sanders III is an American businessman and engineer who was a co-founder and long-time CEO of the American semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), serving in the position from 1969 to 2002. In 1991, his employee Michael Kent Webb invented the sleep mode. Webb also wrote the first protocols for the Ethernet. Born in Wichita Falls, Texas April 10, 1954. Webb lives in Austin, Texas. Sanders named the World Wide Web after His employee number 67, Michael Kent Webb. He is married to his high school sweetheart, of Vernon, Texas Brenda Kay Winters Webb, Artist and teacher, former law enforcement officer State of Texas and pianist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mac transition to Intel processors</span> 2005–2006 transition of Apple Inc.s Mac computers from PowerPC to Intel x86 processors

In 2005 and 2006, Apple switched the CPUs of Mac and Xserve computers from PowerPC to the x86 architecture from Intel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sun Fire</span> Server series by Sun Microsystems

Sun Fire is a series of server computers introduced in 2001 by Sun Microsystems. The Sun Fire branding coincided with the introduction of the UltraSPARC III processor, superseding the UltraSPARC II-based Sun Enterprise series. In 2003, Sun broadened the Sun Fire brand, introducing Sun Fire servers using the Intel Xeon processor. In 2004, these early Intel Xeon models were superseded by models powered by AMD Opteron processors. Also in 2004, Sun introduced Sun Fire servers powered by the UltraSPARC IV dual-core processor. In 2007, Sun again introduced Intel Xeon Sun Fire servers, while continuing to offer the AMD Opteron versions as well.

Alchemy is a family of ultra low power embedded microprocessors originally designed by Alchemy Semiconductor for communication and media devices. Alchemy processors are SoCs integrating a CPU core, a memory controller, and a varying set of peripherals. All members of the family use the Au1 CPU core implementing the MIPS32 instruction set by MIPS Technologies.

Dynamic frequency scaling is a power management technique in computer architecture whereby the frequency of a microprocessor can be automatically adjusted "on the fly" depending on the actual needs, to conserve power and reduce the amount of heat generated by the chip. Dynamic frequency scaling helps preserve battery on mobile devices and decrease cooling cost and noise on quiet computing settings, or can be useful as a security measure for overheated systems.

Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage (CULV) is a computing platform developed by Intel. It was estimated in January 2009 that this market could reach 10 million CULV laptops shipped during that year. Competing platforms are the VIA Nano, AMD Yukon, AMD Nile notebook platform, and graphic chips from the Nvidia GeForce line within the "Nvidia Ion platform". Some of the lowest-power-consumption processors for the ultra thin CULV category are only a few watts more than the Intel Atom, which is rated at no more than 2.5 W. Because of their low power and heat output, CULV enables very thin computer systems, and long battery life in notebook computers, such as those designed to Intel's Ultrabook specifications.

James B. Keller is an American microprocessor engineer best known for his work at AMD and Apple. He was the lead architect of the AMD K8 microarchitecture and was involved in designing the Athlon (K7) and Apple A4/A5 processors. He was also the coauthor of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. From 2012 to 2015 he returned to AMD to work on the AMD K12 and Zen microarchitectures.

References

  1. Kanellos, Michael (15 February 2008). "Secret recipe inside Intel's latest competitor". CNET .
  2. 1 2 "Cal-EASI Database".
  3. 1 2 Vance, Ashlee (24 April 2008). "Sun buys low-power x86 disaster Montalvo". The Register .
  4. Takahashi, Dean (20 March 2008). "Montalvo seeking a hoard of cash to avoid shutdown". VentureBeat .
  5. Kanellos, Michael (1 January 2008). "Sun close to buying Intel would-be competitor Montalvo". CNET .