Montalvo, another Transmeta or really something new?

Many companies have promised to take on Intel in the x86 space, but not many have fared very well, either going under or being scooped up Intel’s arch rival AMD. Today, News.com posted an interesting article about a Santa Clara, California based startup named Montalvo Systems that is supposedly designing multi-core chips for the ultraportable and notebook spaces. Don’t bother checking their web site-unless you are looking for a job in California, Colorado, or India, for other than that it has absolutely no product or company information. The Register reported in 2006 that former Transmeta CEO Matt Perry assumed the CEO position at Montalvo during that year. However, the News.com article yields several new insights, such as the fact that Peter Song, who previously founded MemoryLogix, is Montalvo’s chief architect, and that Peter Glaskowsky is their chief system architect. The company has so far raised $73 million through several venture capital firms. The currently published patent applications do not reveal much about the processor as they are focused mainly on power conservation via a buffer/mini-cache that either reduces DRAM accesses or provides information when the processor is in a low-power state and thus not available. The two patent applications can be found here and here. I was hoping of finding one of the Montalvo guys at the ISSCC conference this week in hope of obtaining some additional information; however, with thousands of engineers running around this proved to be a futile attempt. As such, unless Montalvo makes a public announcement later this year or emerges from stealth mode, it will be hard to make any comparisons to Transmeta or to assess the company’s chances.