Sun copies Apple, buys a chip maker

FOR THE SECOND TIME this week, a relatively unknown semiconductor company is being snapped up by a tech giant. This time, it’s Sun Microsystems and they’ve just bought themselves the tasty technical assets of Montalvo Systems.

Montalvo Systems, who practically no one had ever heard of until yesterday, have apparently been trying to crack the x86 market for a while now, but when faced with titans like Chipzilla and AMD, they really didn’t stand too much of a chance, which is probably why they’re thanking their lucky ‘stars’ that Sun came along when it did.

The deal was apparently signed at the beginning of this week, but the two companies decided to keep things under wraps for a few days before making the announcement on April 24^th. According to the Montalvo website, the company is a well funded fabless semiconductor startup funded by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms”.

Sun is best known for producing its own SPARC products and its UltraSPARC processors, so some might find it a little peculiar that the company has decided to branch out into x86s, which are primary chips that are often bunged into commodity servers as well as computers. But then again, x86 chips are a bit more popular, so Sun must be thinking clearly (now that the rain has gone).

Sun spokeswoman, Dana Lengkeek, told Eweek, "The assets will be integrated into the Microelectronics business unit”. Rumour has it that Montalvo is developing low-power processors, so Intel better watch its back for Sun burn.

On Wednesday, Apple revealed it was buying PA Semi, a fabless firm from the Valley that uses IBM’s Power Architecture to design low-power processors for the embedded market. We speculated that the fruit themed toy maker intended to stick the company’s small, low-power chips in its next-generation Iphones and Ipods, cutting Intel out, and saving itself some serious cash in the process.

Time will tell whether Sun’s acquisition casts another cloud on Intel’s horizon. µ

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