All-Star Lineup Heads Chip Startup

Let’s see, there’s Intel’s Pentium and XScale, IBM’s Power, Sun’s Sparc
line, FreeScale, ARM, and the list of microprocessors goes on. Why on earth
do we need another on?

P.A. Semi plans to answer that question emphatically on October 28, when
it unveils the fruits of its two years of stealth design. The Silicon Valley
startup is expected to preview its first chips at the Fall Processor Forum
conference sponsored by In-Stat.

The company isn’t saying much until then, except for a few tantalizing
details and the background of some of its impressive engineering talent. In
an email to internetnews.com, P.A. Semi said it plans to “face the
800-pound gorillas head-on — including Intel, AMD
and Freescale — by building a high-performance processor at
unprecedented low-power.” At the P.A. Semi Web site, the company said it will have
products for high-end consumer portables, server blades and network
infrastructure.

Just a few years back, in 2000, another highly-regarded Silicon Valley
chip startup burst on the
scene with similar grand ambitions. And for a while it looked like that
company, Transmeta, might just pull it off. Transmeta had world-class
engineers, big investors and a software emulation scheme that let its
low-power Crusoe chip offer Intel compatibility at a fraction of the price.

But Transmeta suffered a lengthy delay getting Crusoe to market and
finally got but a few notebook computer and blade manufacturers to sign on.
Meanwhile, the company’s bold marketing tactics stirred Intel to action; the
chip giant responded with a competitive low-power push of its own that
continues to this day. Transmeta sold
Crusoe earlier this year.

“Transmeta totally discredited Intel and did everything it could to tick
them off, and they succeeded. That was a mistake,” Kevin Krewell, an analyst
with Processor Forum host In-Stat, told internetnews.com.
“P.A. Semi is not going after the same market that Transmeta was, like
ultra-portable, Intel-compatible PCs. They will have a different instruction
set and will be looking at markets like low-power, high-performance
servers.”

Krewell also said P.A. Semi’s presentation will be a preview of products
not due to ship till next year.

“Intel, AMD and IBM all have a low-power and multi-core focus, so, at some
level, [P.A. Semi] is betting they can outdo those companies by a lot,”
Gordon Haff, analyst with Illuminata, told internetnews.com. “It
really depends on their target market, but even a 20 or 30 percent
improvement isn’t going to be enough to get manufacturers to switch to
another chip.”

Krewell said P.A. Semi has an “all-star team of designers, and its
technology looks good.” A non-disclosure agreement forbids him from getting
any more specific.

Heading P.A. Semi is president and CEO Dan Dobberpuhl, creator of the
highly regarded Alpha, a pioneering, innovative
64-bit chip that was rated the fastest processor in the world at the
time of its release in 1992; and StrongARM for DEC, now owned by Intel, which
has evolved it to the XScale
processor for cell phones and mobile computing devices. P.A. Semi also
has engineers who helped lead the design of the original AMD Opteron, Intel
Itanium and Sun UltraSparc processors.

Before P.A. Semi, Dobberpuhl headed SiByte,
an embedded processor company that designed high-performance networking
chips using MIPS Technologies’ design architecture.

“There is quite an impressive group of people involved with this company,
but it does take more than that to be successful,” noted Haff. He added
that, as Transmeta discovered, the market for low-power blades has not been
nearly as strong as analysts expected, and P.A. will have to offer a
breakthrough to make serious headway.

“Power in the data center is definitely a concern,” said Haff. “And the
idea that servers have low utilization, so let’s get max density with a blade
solution, sounds great on paper, but it hasn’t been widely accepted by IT
departments.”