eb-asia.com
THE tremors in the PC processor business are continuing. In addition to its Joshua processor which is now
sampling, VIA Technologies of Taiwan has revealed plans for a CPU expected to reach volume production
in the second half of 2000.
The second of VIA's CPUs, codenamed Samuel, will be based on IP from VIA's Centaur design unit
purchased from Integrated Device Technologies (IDT) in September. The part will be based on IDT's C5
core.
VIA will unveil the processor at the CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany in February, according to
VIA spokesperson Richard Brown.
Meanwhile, yet another of the few remaining CPU competitors in the PC business has dropped out. US
CPU design house Rise Technologies will exit the mainstream PC processor business and refocus its efforts
on developing processors for non-PC applications.
David Lin, Rise's CEO, says that by going after the information appliance market, the company will be
playing on the low power consumption of its MP6 processor.
"With information appliances, low power consumption is a must have," Lin says.
But the change will not come without costs to Rise, he says. Plans for the next generation of its PC
processor, the MP6-2, have been shelved, even though all the development work on the part has been
completed.
At the recent Comdex show in the US, Rise showed several examples of design wins where its power
consumption is an advantage. One design win involved a series of notebook computers sold by NetSchools
Corp designed for use in classrooms and sold to school districts. The low power consumption allows the
machine to be built without a fan and also allows the battery to store enough power for an entire school
day, the company says.
At Comdex, Rise also announced a set-top box design win with Stellar One Corp.
Rise caused some head scratching at the Microprocessor Forum in October when it suddenly canceled
plans to present a paper on its roadmap. At the time, the only explanation was that the company was
reevaluating its plans.
The Rise roadmap had apparently included a Celeron competitor, the MP6-2. But as a newcomer in the
PC processor field, Rise was just another company wounded by the punishing price war between Intel and
Advanced Micro Devices for control of the low-end PC processor market.
"We had the ability internally to do a 1GHz microprocessor, but we decided not to pursue it," Lin said.
In another development with a potential impact on the PC processor market, Linus Torvalds, creator of the
Linux operating system and an employee of San Jose-based Transmeta Corp, one of Silicon Valley's most
secretive chip startups, disclosed some information about his company's upcoming product.
"We're doing a smart CPU," Torvalds says. "It's kind of an interesting approach to microprocessor design
using software. I still can't talk about details, but we'll do a full disclosure in mid-January of next year."
Apparently Transmeta's first part will be called Crusoe and will consist of a combination of hardware and
software aimed at mobile applications, according to new statements on the company's website.
According to patents issued to Transmeta, the company has been working on a processor approach that
combines software and hardware to allow the chip to run instructions for several varieties of
microprocessors, including x86 chips. The processor would use software to translate chip instructions into
its own native instruction language.
Arik Hesseldahl |
