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In Silicon Valley, A Tech Legend Lays Big Plans
By DON CLARK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 3, 2005; Page B1
Andy Bechtolsheim has a knack for spotting big ideas early.
As a Stanford University graduate student in 1981, he designed computer workstation that helped create Sun Microsystems Inc. and a multibillion-dollar industry. Seventeen years later, two other Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, approached Mr. Bechtolsheim about an idea for a Web search engine. His $100,000 check helped bankroll Google Inc., an investment now valued at about $670 million following a 7% jump in that company's stock yesterday.
Now, after stints at Cisco Systems Inc. and two start-up companies, the legendary hardware designer is back at Sun pursuing another big idea -- one that could create wrenching changes for the industry as well as provide growth opportunities. "Billions of dollars of dislocation is going to happen," Mr. Bechtolsheim predicts.
The cause: technology advances that allow the same basic chip technology used in personal computers to power the very largest systems, too.
Those microprocessors -- based on a design called x86 that was popularized by Intel Corp. -- already provide calculating power for low-end server systems that are commonplace in corporate computer rooms. But for complex chores, like running big databases, Sun and other vendors still make expensive, and profitable, machines from proprietary chips.
Now Mr. Bechtolsheim is using x86 chips from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to develop machines that are suited for high-end computing chores as well as simpler jobs. The new computer family, code-named Galaxy, is expected to include models with four to eight times the capacity of ordinary x86 servers.
The challenge for Mr. Bechtolsheim is to build a new business without wounding Sun's proprietary-computer lines, which are already suffering from declining revenues. "He wants to try to fix Sun," says Forest Baskett, a venture capitalist at New Enterprise Associates and onetime Sun competitor who was Mr. Bechtolsheim's adviser at Stanford. "He has a huge burden."
But few people in Silicon Valley would count out Mr. Bechtolsheim, a German-born engineer with a long track record of developing innovative and commercially successful products. David Patterson, a pioneer in chip technology and professor of computer science at the University of California who consults for Sun, goes so far as to compare Mr. Bechtolsheim to the greatest warrior in the Trojan War: "When you have Achilles on your side, your side is feeling pretty good," he says.
Mr. Bechtolsheim wouldn't compare himself to a mythic hero. Indeed, though he is a star engineer and investor, his associates see few changes wrought by wealth and fame. "He is very humble," says Scott McNealy, Sun's chief executive officer. "He's just like your dream genius."
The 49-year-old engineer is famed for designing circuit boards but also has a flair for styling computer cases and is known for an encyclopedic knowledge of mundane components such as networking sockets and power supplies. He routinely buys and tears apart competitors' machines to study them, a habit started at age five when he dismantled a costly tape recorder, to his father's consternation.
As a teenager in Germany, Mr. Bechtolsheim persuaded a maker of machine tools to control them using a microprocessor rather than custom circuitry. The job required programming, using machine code rather than easier computer languages. Mr. Bechtolsheim says fees from this manufacturer helped to finance his U.S. education.
At Stanford, forced to share time on minicomputers, Mr. Bechtolsheim and his collaborators created designs that could put that power in the hands of an individual. But computer companies either declined to license the designs or used the technology in minicomputer-style systems. So Sun was formed, and Mr. Bechtolsheim invested some of his own money despite warnings from venture capitalists. "There was no risk in my mind," he says. "It was a complete no-brainer."
Mr. Bechtolsheim worked at Sun until 1995, when he left to form Granite Systems Inc. The start-up, co-founded with Stanford computer-science professor David Cheriton, designed early switching devices that could ship one billion bits -- a gigabit -- of data per second, a tenfold jump over the 100-megabit hardware of the day. Networking giant Cisco bought Granite in 1996 for stock then valued at about $220 million; the start-up's technology helped create a major Cisco product line.
Along the way, Mr. Bechtolsheim also became an active investor, particularly in makers of software for designing electronic components. His stake in one such company, Magma Design Automation Inc., is currently valued at more than $40 million. In 2001, Mr. Bechtolsheim and Mr. Cheriton formed a start-up called Kealia, designing servers for delivering video over the Internet. That's where Mr. Bechtolsheim first adopted AMD's server chip, called Opteron. Sun purchased Kealia in February 2004, returning Mr. Bechtolsheim to the company.
Like earlier x86 chips, Opteron can run software that processes 32 bits of data at a time. But it can also run more complex 64-bit software and has an efficient design for passing data between chips. That allows machines with multiple Opteron chips to tap into one vast pool of memory, a requirement for the biggest computing jobs.
Sun and some competitors routinely connect dozens of proprietary chips together for high-end machines. Though a few companies, such as Verari Systems Inc., sell eight-processor Opteron systems, the majority of x86 systems have one to four chips.
That picture is changing. AMD is soon expected to introduce the equivalent of two processors on a single chip, a technology called "dual-core." Those chips would swiftly give a four-Opteron machine the power of eight processors.
Mr. Bechtolsheim, without giving details, makes clear that his plans include 16-processor machines. Meanwhile, partners such as Newisys, a unit of Sanmina-SCI Corp., are working on technology to help as many as 32 processors work together.
John Fowler, the executive vice president in charge of Sun's network systems group, says the computer family will include a new data-storage system and modular machines composed of circuit boards called blades. Mr. Bechtolsheim already wows corporate customers by pushing in a cart and unveiling Galaxy prototypes. "People just get out of their seats," Mr. McNealy says. "They starting holding them and picking them up, like what kids do with an iPod."
Sun still plans to extend its proprietary technology. But Mr. Bechtolsheim is determined to make machines that customers want, whatever the impact on other product lines. Fred Weber, AMD's chief technology officer, predicts that the engineer's latest crusade will pay off. "People have been down on Sun the way people were once down on Apple," he says. "But if you look carefully, the seeds of a real renaissance are there."
Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com |
