Microprocessor Startup Apocalypse?

This past week, I was a participant in the annual Hot Chips symposium at Stanford University. As part of the organizing committee, I help the conference with PR, including press and analysts. The conference is a mix of academic and commercial presentations, but the general leaning of the conference is more commercial – especially after the demise of the Microprocessor Forum.

This year’s attendance was up sharply from 2009 and pretty much matched 2007 and 2008. That’s a healthy sign for the business – companies are spending money to send people to conferences. But there’s a dark side to this year’s conference – paper submissions was down. Many of the papers this year came from stalwarts AMD, IBM, and Intel. There were a few new companies, but one presenter’s company (Tier Logic) had already been declared dead by Microprocessor Report (July 19th edition - $$)

And on the same day the conference kicked off, Jim Turley, editor in chief of Microprocessor Report, released an editorial on the futility of new microprocessor startups. With a title of “How to Blow $100 Million,” the editorial goes on to develop a rule of thumb that a new microprocessor start-up needs about $100 million in order to fully launch the company. After the idea rattled off a few people, the general consensus that if the new microprocessor requires extensive tools support (compilers, debuggers, etc), that $100 million is not ridiculously high.

And there is the problem – how can you raise a $100 million form VCs these days, when the risks are high, the returns questionable, and many other “sexier” markets (like green tech, social media, location aware services) are out there. A look at recent microprocessor start-up is not encouraging: Raza Micro (where a spent a few months) was sold to Net Logic, PA Semi was sold to Apple, Intrinsity was also sold to Apple, Montalvo was shuttered, Stream Processor Inc. (SPI) is no more, and the list goes on.
I find it sad and disheartening that the microprocessor business is undergoing such major consolidations and innovative new architectures will likely not get funded. The next new architecture may come from the emerging powers such as China. We saw the Chine “Godson” processor evolve rapidly until now we see a are talking about a processor with a wide SIMD unit, running over 1GHz that soon could be the foundation of a major supercomputer. They even talk about an x86 emulations software layer supported by special instructions. With the support of the government and access to a competitive foundry, I wouldn’t underestimate where there program could be a few more years.

Now for something close to my heart: microprocessors. I have a question for you: is microprocessor design dying? I ask, because chips like Intel's Atom are perceived as innovative, when, in fact, Atom is a through back design. An analyst was asked by a publication is he thought Atom would be one of the innovations of the year. Atom is dual-issue, in-order design where low power trumps performance. The architecture is stripped down and basic, not innovative. The innovation is in the marketing of it.

Another piece of evidence: MIPS is planning as layoff. It's been pretty obvious that MIPS ran out of ideas and has been coasting on the designs of Cavium and RMI to keep it relevant and setup boxes and PS2 for revenue. It was destined to be squeezed by POWER from above and Arm from below, but MIPS gave in with a whimper, not a real fight.

The big iron guys like IBM and Sun still keep moving along, but the excitement now comes from the promise of many smaller cores working together (what Sun calls Throughput Computing) with processors like Niagara and Larrabee, only there's this problem with creating mainstream software for many-core processors. And if the goal IS more cores/mm2, those cores are going to be rather simple in design (like the x86 cores in Larrabee).

So, we dump the problem onto the programmers and sit back and yell: "What's the problem? Can't you programmers figure out how to split that code over a bunch of cores? What's so hard about that?"

Well for graphics, it isn't too tough, because there's all these pixel to work on in parallel. It's also reasonably well known in data base, web serving, and some super-computer programming. But it's still going to be a challenge for many other applications.

Then again, maybe we have to ask: are processors already good enough for typical client workloads? Therefore, we don't need particularly powerful client microprocessors, just really good Internet connectivity to cloud computing and low power. Gamers and professional content creators will be the lone users of powerful client computers. Like with cars, everybody is worried about gas mileage today and only a few crazies still care about performance.

I'm just asking.

Back again with some time to post. There's been some interesting news I'd like to cover.

First, Apple introduced new products at MacWorld. The most controversial product was the MacBook Air, the thinnest notebook shipping today (maybe, the thinnest ever). I found the Air made too many compromises to be anything but an executive toy. I know something about sub-notebooks having owned a Fujitsu P2040 with the Transmeta Crusoe processor and an having recently purchased an ASUS Eee PC. Both of those laptops made compromises, but Apple chose the style, keyboard, and larger display over flexibility, connectivity, and expandability. While I will wait until I see one in person before casting my final opinion, I can't imagine that the one USB port on the Air is in any way sufficient for external mic/headset, wired Ethernet, external storage, etc. Beside, the Air turns out to be Apple's slowest notebook and is using Intel's older 65nm processor, not the latest 45nm Penryn processor.

The other big news (as far as I'm concerned) is the announcement of VIA's "Isaiah" processor (also known as the CN processor). This is a major leap forward for VIA's Centaur design team. The processor had been announced at the 2004 Fall Microprocessor Forum, back when I was still at Microprocessor Report. Glenn Henry announced the design at the 2004 Fall MPF and gives a detailed description at ExtremeTech.com.

In looking over the wafer pictures, I figure the die is about 65mm2 in size, larger
than I thought it would be in 2004, but then I didn't expect VIA to put a 1MB L2 cache on die. I also expected VIA would put an on-die memory controller in the design, but they did not. I guess VIA prefers a clean division of labor - processors in Texas and chipsets in Taiwan.

Overall the processor looks interesting, splitting the difference between the Core 2 processors (Penryn is 107mm2) and the upcoming UMPC/MID processor Silverthorne (at 25mm2). Performance should be right in the middle of those two Intel processor families. The question is: is there enough room for VIA to operate or is it too tight a squeeze.