Peter Principle

Chip Industry Sets a Plan for Life After Silicon

Sun has high expectations for Niagara

Way back in 1993, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was graduating from college, I interviewed with processor designer MicroUnity in Silicon Valley. They had lots of smart people and were doing some amazing things. They had designed a high performance multithreaded processor. They developed highly parallel multimedia applications. They were pushing the bounds of circuit fabrication, with air bridges for interconnects. And they were building their own fab line in Silicon Valley.

“If you want to talk about innovative, they were off the charts. They were looking at making major changes to the microarchitecture and fabrication techniques. They just had too many radical ideas in one package,” [said Lynley Gwennap]. “But from a technology standpoint, they had some really innovative stuff.”

Unfortunately, in the long tradition of ambitious engineering efforts, they went out of business. But this week brought news of some justification for founder John Moussouris and his engineers. Intel agreed to pay $300 million to MicroUnity to settle patent claims related to multithreading. That’s not a huge return over 15 years, considering that MicroUnity raised over $150 million in VC funding in its heyday. But it might lead to other lawsuits and payoffs over MicroUnity’s patents.

The company started by legendary processor designer Dan Dobberpuhl has finally gone public, announcing a very energy efficient processor based on the PowerPC architecture. They claim their design has five to ten times the performance per watt of mainstream PC processors. (Of course, that’s not setting the bar very high).

The company, P.A. Semi, is pre-announcing their design at this week’s Fall Processor Forum. Working hardware is not expected until the middle of 2006. Their first chip will contain two processor cores and additional support logic. It’s expected to run at 2.5 GHz, and only consume 5 – 13 watts.