A few weeks ago Nick Tredennick published a rather interesting analysis of the current state of the semiconductor market, titled Computing in Transition. Now why would you care about what Nick has to say about computing? Well, let’s say he has been around the block a few times. He worked on microcontrollers for Motorola in the late 70s, and then worked on the design of the Micro/370 microprocessor at IBM in the eighties before becoming the director of product development at Nexgen, followed by a quick stint as the chief scientists at Altera in the 90s. Currently he holds the president post at Tredennick Inc., a company specializing in consulting for full-custom and semi-custom VLSI designs. And if this were not enough, he also is an editor for the Glider Technology Report. As you see, when Nick publishes a presentation it is probably worth reviewing to get a viewpoint from an industry veteran.

In his latest presentation the premise is that the microprocessor in essence stalled innovation in logic design since it allowed programming to become a substitute for logic design. This held true as long as the design goal was defined by cost-performance. However, more recently with the introduction of power constraints the design goal has been modified to be cost-performance per watt, leading to multi-core chips. As such, the computing market is in a transitional phase, however, where exactly it is heading is rather hard to predict. What might help therefore is an analysis of where the industry has been and where it is now.

Here Nick digs up some very interesting facts and charts: For example, while it seems that companies are shipping millions of chips yearly, the semiconductor market accounts for less than one percent of the gross world product (GWP). At least the semiconductor market is growing at about twice the rate of the GWP. How is this for another interesting prediction: Unlike technology pundits who like to predict future killer applications that will take the market by storm, Nick has a rather simple prediction: there will be no such application. A couple other things get cleared up as well: First, Motorola destroyed Four-Phase Systems leaving Intel to dominate the microprocessor market and Altera is older than Xilinx. On the more serious side, Nick does a great job breaking down the current market into different segments, Microprocessors, ASICs, FPGA, etc. He then also dissects the market based on design goals: zero cost, zero power, zero delay, and zero volume.  These two approaches are then used in turn to analyze where some of the current products fall. But that’s not all, more analysis follows taking into consideration transistor scaling, yield implications, processor complexity and design effort. Eventually, Nick arrives at the prediction that reconfigurable hardware might well be the answer to optimizing future designs for the particular function they are to implement at a particular point in time. How exactly he gets to this conclusion is best understood by reading his presentation. One more thing, the presentation is almost 40 pages long, so you better grab a coffee and a comfortable chair.

Out of the blue two major semiconductor startup acquisitions occurred during the last week. First, Apple acquired PowerPC chip developer P. A. Semi, and then a day later Sun Microsystems snapped up Montalvo who we just recently wrote about as being in need of some serious funding. Let’s talk about the latter acquisition first. If what the The Register is reporting is correct, then Sun got quite a bargain in acquiring Montalvo for a mere five million dollars, as venture capital firms poured about $73 million into the low-power startup over the last few years. It has been widely speculated that Sun is mostly interested in some of the patents which we discussed here, as well as the engineering team, rather than the actual product that the company was working on. Since the name of the game has changed from a pure MHz race to performance per Watt race, any patents that will enable Sun to produce low-power versions of their Rock and Niagara processors seem like a good investment. In any case, it truly seems that Montalvo simply could not find additional funding and thus opted for being acquired as an exit strategy rather than shutting down shop completely.

The Apple acquisition sent shock waves throughout the industry and was followed by rampant speculation. Initially, when Apple dropped Freescale as the chip supplier for their notebooks, many expected for the company to announce that they were going with P. A. Semi. As a matter of fact, when Apple announced that they were going with Intel, the news even caught the P. A. Semi CEO off guard. But P. A. Semi marched on and delivered a PWRficient 64-Bit dual-core processor earlier this year that consumes somewhere between 5 and 13 Watts with a maximum frequency of 2 GHz. Needless to say, this power envelope is way too high for a mobile part, and is more targeted at the networking and telecommunication space. Indeed, it seems that the processor has been selected by several OEMs for their designs. I would find it highly unlikely for Apple to keep the company alive as is though, and thus it is unlikely that there will be a future roadmap for the PWRficient line which might become a problem for some of P. A. Semi’s existent customers. This in turn could play into the hands of Freescale, which has PowerPC based products in a similar power envelope. Additionally, Broadcom and Qualcomm have been looking into expanding past their existing markets, so this might prove a boon to them as well. It also seems unlikely hat Apple would intend to use the PWEficient processor to go against Intel’s latest Atom processor, which has a lower power envelope and has been well received in the press since being introduced earlier this year. Maybe Apple’s acquisition was along the same lines as Sun’s, mostly for patents and the engineering team. Anyhow, I would not hold my breath for Apple to announce what they intend to do with the acquisition any time soon. In the meantime, for some interesting speculation and comments, take a look at Beyond3D’s article here.

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