 Logo with original name | |
| Founded | 2002 |
|---|---|
| Founder | S. Atiq Raza |
| Fate | Merged into NetLogic Microsystems, then Broadcom |
| Products | Network processors |
RMI Corporation, formerly Raza Microelectronics, Inc., was a privately held fabless semiconductor company headquartered in Cupertino, California, which specialized in designing system-on-a-chip processors for computer networking (known as network processors) and consumer media applications.
Atiq Raza was Hired as the CEO of NexGen in 1991, NexGen was later acquired by AMD in 1995. Raza was AMD's president and chief operating officer in the late 1990s after the NexGen acquisition. He left AMD in 1999 and founded Raza Microelectronics, Inc. in 2002. [1] In 2003, SandCraft Inc folded, and Raza acquired the rights to its intellectual property. Behrooz Abdi became president and CEO in November 2007, and Raza Microelectronics changed its name to RMI Corporation in December 2007. [2] In January 2008 Raza settled with the US Securities and Exchange Commission over an allegation of insider trading during 2006. [1] [3] RMI was not affiliated with Foundries Holdings, LLC, formerly known as Raza Foundries, Inc.
Most of RMI's revenue came from its multi-core processor product line, which had major customers from China including Huawei, ZTE, and H3C. The China business of RMI was built from scratch by its co-founder Sunny Siu. In 2008, RMI merged with NetLogic Microsystems, which was acquired by Broadcom in 2012.
RMI had four product lines: three developed internally and one acquired.
The XLR (introduced circa 2005) was a multicore, multithreaded CPU used for network processing. XLR integrated circuits had 2 to 8 MIPS architecture CPU cores, each extended to support 4 hardware threads. [4] XLR processors included HyperTransport, PCI-X, Gigabit Ethernet, and IEEE floating point unit per core and optionally 10 Gigabit Ethernet interconnects. [5] A 2.0 GHz clock rate for the XLP was announced in May 2009. [6]
The XLS was a smaller, lower-cost multicore multithreading MIPS-based CPU used for network processing. The XLS family had options with 1 or 2 CPU cores, each with 4 hardware threads; 2 to 8 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces or two 10-gigabit Ethernet interfaces; and 1 or 2 PCI-Express interfaces. [5] The XLS processor was widely used in Huawei's LTE base stations.
The Alchemy processor was originally developed by Alchemy Semiconductor, which was then purchased by AMD. This product line was purchased by RMI in 2006. [7] The Alchemy processor is a low-power MIPS architecture system-on-a-chip with integrated graphics and signal processing, designed for media players and portable video devices. [8]
The Orion network interface chip was used to translate Gigabit Ethernet data traffic to synchronous optical networking (SONET/SDH) Optical Carrier OC-48 network links and back again, to connect local area networks with wide area network circuits. [9]
RMI processors were used in router, firewall, and switch products sold by other networking equipment vendors, and consumer electronics manufacturers.
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets.
MIPS Tech LLC, formerly MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and MIPS Technologies, Inc., is an American fabless semiconductor design company that is most widely known for developing the MIPS architecture and a series of RISC CPU chips based on it. MIPS provides processor architectures and cores for digital home, networking, embedded, Internet of things and mobile applications.
A network interface controller is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network.
In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components on one or more integrated circuits that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. The chipset is usually found on the motherboard of computers. Chipsets are usually designed to work with a specific family of microprocessors. Because it controls communications between the processor and external devices, the chipset plays a crucial role in determining system performance.
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a technique for improving the overall efficiency of superscalar CPUs with hardware multithreading. SMT permits multiple independent threads of execution to better use the resources provided by modern processor architectures.
The southbridge is one of the two chips in the core logic chipset on older personal computer (PC) motherboards, the other being the northbridge. As of 2023, most personal computer devices no longer use a set of two chips, and instead have a single chip acting as the 'chipset', for example Intel's Z790 chipset.
NexGen, Inc. was a private semiconductor company based in Milpitas, California, that designed x86 microprocessors until it was purchased by AMD in 1996. NexGen was a fabless design house that designed its chips but relied on other companies for production. NexGen's chips were produced by IBM's Microelectronics division in Burlington, Vermont alongside PowerPC and DRAM parts.
TCP offload engine (TOE) is a technology used in some network interface cards (NIC) to offload processing of the entire TCP/IP stack to the network controller. It is primarily used with high-speed network interfaces, such as gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, where processing overhead of the network stack becomes significant. TOEs are often used as a way to reduce the overhead associated with Internet Protocol (IP) storage protocols such as iSCSI and Network File System (NFS).
The nForce3 chipset was created by Nvidia as a Media and Communications Processor. Specifically, it was designed for use with the Athlon 64 processor.
The Sun Ray was a stateless thin client computer aimed at corporate environments, originally introduced by Sun Microsystems in September 1999 and discontinued by Oracle Corporation in 2014. It featured a smart card reader and several models featured an integrated flat panel display.
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.
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.
The ETRAX CRIS is a RISC ISA and series of CPUs designed and manufactured by Axis Communications for use in embedded systems since 1993. The name is an acronym of the chip's features: Ethernet, Token Ring, AXis - Code Reduced Instruction Set. Token Ring support has been taken out from the latest chips as it has become obsolete.
A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions but the single processor can run instructions on separate cores at the same time, increasing overall speed for programs that support multithreading or other parallel computing techniques. Manufacturers typically integrate the cores onto a single integrated circuit die or onto multiple dies in a single chip package. The microprocessors currently used in almost all personal computers are multi-core.
TILE64 is a VLIW ISA multicore processor manufactured by Tilera. It consists of a mesh network of 64 "tiles", where each tile houses a general purpose processor, cache, and a non-blocking router, which the tile uses to communicate with the other tiles on the processor.
QorIQ is a brand of ARM-based and Power ISA–based communications microprocessors from NXP Semiconductors. It is the evolutionary step from the PowerQUICC platform, and initial products were built around one or more e500mc cores and came in five different product platforms, P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5, segmented by performance and functionality. The platform keeps software compatibility with older PowerPC products such as the PowerQUICC platform. In 2012 Freescale announced ARM-based QorIQ offerings beginning in 2013.
AMD Lance Am7990 IEEE 802.3 Ethernet media access controller (MAC) controller were introduced in 1985. Its architecture is the basis for AMD's PCnet Family of highly integrated single-chip Ethernet controllers. The one exception is the Am79C940 MAC. The Am7990 chip was fabricated in NMOS technology and has no integrated Manchester encoder/decoder (ENDEC) nor does it have an integrated 10BASE-T transceiver.
NetLogic Microsystems, Inc. was a fabless semiconductor company that developed high performance products for data center, enterprise, wireless and wireline infrastructure networks. The company was founded in 1995 by Norman Godinho and Varad Srinivasan, became a public company on the NASDAQ exchange under the leadership of CEO Ronald Jankov in July 2004 and was acquired by Broadcom Corporation for $3.7 billion in February 2012.
Heterogeneous computing refers to systems that use more than one kind of processor or core. These systems gain performance or energy efficiency not just by adding the same type of processors, but by adding dissimilar coprocessors, usually incorporating specialized processing capabilities to handle particular tasks.
Since 1985, many processors implementing some version of the MIPS architecture have been designed and used widely.