Upstart claims VC interest in its x86 chip design for handhelds

The four-man company unveiled details of its wonderchip at the Microprocessor Forum last week, as we reported here. A spokesman the company, Tony Heller, told the INQUIRER that the company's design for a x86-architecture chip to go up against Transmeta and ARM was what venture capitalists he had spoken to called, "Exactly the type of thing we're looking for".

Heller claimed there was nothing in the x86 architectuire which would preclude it competing with ARM designs. Indeed, he made some substantial claims for the design his company had produced, saying it would deliver comparable power consumption and die size figures to what current ARM designs can manage.

The trump card for the company, Heller claimed, was its use of the x86 architecture for hand held devices, which would, he said, enable Microsoft to run a version of Windows XP on handhelds. He claimed the software company would happily "dump CE" if it could get XP into handheld devices.

Heller also rejected our writer's suggestions from the Microrprocessor Forum that there may be contention issues in the design. "We do have out of order execution," he said. "We have 64 registers on the chip, it swaps it out - there is no contention between registers," he told us in an interview.

Heller himself worked on National Semiconductor's MediaGX, which is the core of their Geode DX chip, an x-86 design for set-to boxes and thin clients. His fellow architect and partner, Peter Song, has worked on a number of processor designs including Samsung's Media processor as well as having lead the picoTurbo ARM clone design and worked for AMD.

He claimed their latest design was superior to the Geode and to Transmeta's offerings. He aid the upgrade cycle for the company's processor would be enhanced because of its abilty to emulate, obviating the need to redesign at each new iteration, as well as the performance improvements the chip was capable of because of its symmetric multithreading abilities.

The INQUIRER was first alerted to the activities of MemoryLogix, when we realised the company had dropped off the original list of attendees at the Microprocessor forum. Heller explained that, as a four-band band, the company had failed to get its abstract in in time, "Luckily," he said, "someone dropped out so we got our slot back".

It remains to be seen whether their design matches the claims the company makes for it. We'll keep you posted... µ