Rise Technology, one of a new generation of Intel clone makers (CI No 3,163), is near to bringing its first products to market. The San Jose, California-based company has registered to present its new chip, the MP6, at the annual Microprocessor Forum event to be held in San Jose in October. Five-year-old Rise was founded by chairman and CEO David Lin to match optimized x86-compatible chips with closely defined target markets. The [x86] market has splintered – and will continue to splinter – into a number of segments the company says and it is not possible for the small number of existing CPU companies to create optimal products to fit every segment. Rise’s initial target with the mP6 is low power/low cost Windows-based notebooks. The company’s Rise x86- compatible core will be the basis for the mP6 and subsequent products, and is claimed to enable the company to offer Pentium II class performance per clock capability at much reduced rates of power consumption. The mP6 will also target Intel’s older Socket 7 systems. Rise says the initial version of its chip core, built by its 70-strong team of technicians culled from firms such as Amdahl Corp, Hewlett Packard Co, IBM Corp, LSI Logic, MIPS Technologies Inc, NEC Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc, ran Windows and all tested applications on its first silicon. Rise says it’s already working with early access customers and partners, and has some unidentified deep sub-micron foundry partners in place to fabricate the chip. It has also established a second office in Taiwan. Rise will find itself in competition with National Semiconductor Corp’s Cyrix Corp unit, Integrated Device Technology Inc’s Centaur, and, in the future, the mysterious Transmeta Corp, also based in Santa Clara. Earlier this year, Intel itself altered its long-held strategy of launching processors at the high-end of the market and filtering down previous generation chips for low-end business, in favor of separate branded chips for the low-end, mid range and high-end. The Celeron, launched in March (CI No 3,361) was its low-end product and the Xeon, to be announced today (Monday), is the high-end.
