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Company type | Public: |
---|---|
Nasdaq: AMCC | |
Industry | Semiconductors & Related Devices |
Founded | 1979 |
Defunct | January 26, 2017 |
Fate | Acquired by MACOM Technology Solutions |
Headquarters | Santa Clara, California, US |
Key people | Paramesh Gopi (CEO) |
Revenue | US$206 million (FY 2010) [1] |
US$-26.1 million (FY 2010) [1] | |
US$-7.49 million (FY 2010) [1] | |
Total assets | US$316 million (FY 2010) [2] |
Total equity | US$281 million (FY 2010) [2] |
Number of employees | ~600 |
Website | apm Archived May 16, 2016, at the Wayback Machine |
Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (also known as AppliedMicro, AMCC or APM) was a fabless semiconductor company designing network and embedded Power ISA (including a Power ISA license), and server processor ARM (including an ARMv8-A license), optical transport and storage products.
In 2004, AMCC bought assets, IP and engineers concerning the PowerPC 400 microprocessors from IBM for $227 million and they now market the processors under their own name. [3] The deal also included access to IBM's SoC design methodology and advanced CMOS process technology.
In 2009, AppliedMicro changed their branding from AMCC to AppliedMicro, [4] but still retain the name "Applied Micro Circuits Corporation" officially.
In 2011, AppliedMicro became the first company to implement the ARMv8-A architecture with its X-Gene Platform. In November 2012 at ARM TechCon, AppliedMicro demonstrated advanced web search capabilities and the ability to handle big data workloads in an Apache Hadoop software environment with the X-Gene Platform using FPGA emulation. A silicon implementation of X-Gene was first exhibited publicly in June 2013. [5]
In April 2016, information about the forthcoming X-Gene 3 server chips was made available. The release schedule was for the second half of 2017. The company projected an improved performance, over the X-Gene 2, that with allow it to better compete with servers using the x86-64 architecture. [6]
In November 2016, MACOM Technology Solutions announced that they would purchase AppliedMicro. [7] The acquisition was completed on January 26, 2017. [8] MACOM then sold the processor division to the private equity firm The Carlyle Group during October 2017.
AppliedMicro has a sponsor level membership of Power.org and is one of the original members. AppliedMicro is also executive member (Chairman position) of the Ethernet Alliance. AppliedMicro is also a member of the Open Compute Project.
The Processor Products group designed and marketed embedded microcontrollers as well as server processor, packet and storage processors. It included the network processors of former MMC Networks (acquired October 2000) with IBM PowerPC 4xx series microcontrollers (acquired April 2004).
Since purchasing the IBM PowerPC 400 family (under the 405 and 440 series product names), AppliedMicro developed the 460 series with 440 CPU, and a multicore Power architecture devices.
In January 2008, the AppliedMicro PowerPC 405EX was awarded Product of the Year 2007, by Electronic Product magazine.
In October 2011, AppliedMicro announced its X-Gene Platform, an ARM 64-bit solution aimed at cloud and enterprise servers.
The Connectivity Products group of AppliedMicro designs, manufacturers and markets physical layer devices, framers/mappers and switch fabric devices.
Throughout the years, AppliedMicro has acquired smaller companies to enter new markets.
Date | Acquired company | Expertise | Amount |
---|---|---|---|
April 1998 | Ten Mountain Design | transceiver design | |
March 1999 | Cimaron Communications | SONET chips | $115M in stock |
April 2000 | Yuni Networks | terabit switch fabrics | $241M in stock |
April 2000 | Chameleon Technologies | Fibre Channel and SONET products | |
April 2000 | PBaud Logic Inc. | SONET and forward-error-correction | |
September 2000 | Silutia | CMOS mixed-signal design | 566,000 shares of stock |
October 2000 | MMC Networks | network processors | $4500M in stock |
March 2001 | Raleigh Technology Corporation (RTC) | Ethernet QoS ASICs [9] | |
September 2003 | PowerPRS product line from IBM | switch fabrics | $47M |
December 2003 | JNI | Fibre Channel products | $196M in cash |
April 2004 | PowerPC 400 series product line from IBM | embedded microprocessors | $227M in cash |
April 2004 | 3ware | RAID controllers | $150M in cash |
August 2006 | Quake Technologies | 10 Gb Ethernet transceivers | $69M in cash |
In 2005, the company paid $60 million to settle a class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors against the company, including current and former officers and directors. [10] The suit had charged the company with issuing a series of materially false and misleading statements concerning the company's operations and prospects for Q4 2001 and beyond. [11] Under the terms of the settlement, the company and defendants denied any wrongdoing. About half of the amount of the settlement was covered by insurance. [10]
A microprocessor is a computer processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry required to perform the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU). The IC is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions and performing arithmetic operations. The microprocessor is a multipurpose, clock-driven, register-based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory, and provides results as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic, and operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system.
A microcontroller or microcontroller unit (MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit. A microcontroller contains one or more CPUs along with memory and programmable input/output peripherals. Program memory in the form of ferroelectric RAM, NOR flash or OTP ROM is also often included on chip, as well as a small amount of RAM. Microcontrollers are designed for embedded applications, in contrast to the microprocessors used in personal computers or other general purpose applications consisting of various discrete chips.
PowerPC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture–based processors.
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and software. Founded in Mountain View, California in November 1981 by James Clark, its initial market was 3D graphics computer workstations, but its products, strategies and market positions developed significantly over time.
3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe explained the name 3Com was a contraction of "Computer Communication Compatibility", with its focus on Ethernet technology that he had co-invented, which enabled the networking of computers.
Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the UK, including the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archimedes. Acorn's BBC Micro computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s.
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A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has been used loosely to refer to everything from a mainframe computer terminal to a PC connected to a network, but the most common form refers to the class of hardware offered by several current and defunct companies such as Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer, DEC, HP, NeXT, and IBM which powered the 3D computer graphics revolution of the late 1990s.
In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A computer that uses such a processor is a 64-bit computer.
The PowerPC 400 family is a line of 32-bit embedded RISC processor cores based on the PowerPC or Power ISA instruction set architectures. The cores are designed to fit inside specialized applications ranging from system-on-a-chip (SoC) microcontrollers, network appliances, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to set-top boxes, storage devices and supercomputers.
Microchip Technology Incorporated is a publicly listed American corporation that manufactures microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog, and Flash-IP integrated circuits. Its products include microcontrollers, Serial EEPROM devices, Serial SRAM devices, embedded security devices, radio frequency (RF) devices, thermal, power and battery management analog devices, as well as linear, interface and wireless products.
Titan was a planned family of 32-bit Power ISA-based microprocessor cores designed by Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC), but was scrapped in 2010. Applied Micro chose to continue development of the PowerPC 400 core instead, on a 40 nm fabrication process.
Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.
MACOM Technology Solutions is a developer and producer of radio, microwave, and millimeter wave semiconductor devices and components. The company is headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts, and in 2005 was Lowell's largest private employer. MACOM is certified to the ISO 9001 international quality standard and ISO 14001 environmental standard. The company has design centers and sales offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
The ARM Cortex-M is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Limited. These cores are optimized for low-cost and energy-efficient integrated circuits, which have been embedded in tens of billions of consumer devices. Though they are most often the main component of microcontroller chips, sometimes they are embedded inside other types of chips too. The Cortex-M family consists of Cortex-M0, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M23, Cortex-M33, Cortex-M35P, Cortex-M52, Cortex-M55, Cortex-M85. A floating-point unit (FPU) option is available for Cortex-M4 / M7 / M33 / M35P / M52 / M55 / M85 cores, and when included in the silicon these cores are sometimes known as "Cortex-MxF", where 'x' is the core variant.
This is a comparison of ARM instruction set architecture application processor cores designed by ARM Holdings and 3rd parties. It does not include ARM Cortex-R, ARM Cortex-M, or legacy ARM cores.
A microDataCenter contains compute, storage, power, cooling and networking in a very small volume, sometimes also called a "DataCenter-in-a-box". The term has been used to describe various incarnations of this idea over the past 20 years. Late 2017 a very tightly integrated version was shown at SuperComputing conference 2017: the DOME microDataCenter. Key features are its hot-watercooling, fully solid-state and being built with commodity components and standards only.
SemiAccurate has been waiting for one big thing before declaring ARM servers real and AMCC has just delivered that. If you have been waiting for ARM V8 silicon to arrive, may we present to you AMCC X-Gene silicon in the wild.
Raleigh Technology Corporation designs, develops and markets application specific integrated circuits for Ethernet local-area network switches, routers, and gateways. The company's product is aimed at the higher priced, higher margin market for circuits with value-added features. The company's integrated circuits will let large firms with Ethernet local-area networks converge their voice, data, and video networks by providing guaranteed bandwidth to voice and video.