SM: You have market potential to build a pretty big business. Is that what you want to do? FW: I want to build a profitable and sustainable business. We do not want to grow too fast. Our strategy is to have the right technology, the right architecture and the right product mix in the right
SM: You have been doing this for two years, where are you in terms of products? FW: We don’t produce the DIMM, we produce controller chips. We sell controller chips to DIMM makers. Our partners today are Smart Modular Technologies and Hynix. They take their DRAM, put it on a board with our chips to
SM: How does MetaRam fit your golden rules? FW: I often say the main rule golden rule is “CPUs should talk directly to DRAMs is because that is how God intended it to be, and you should not get in the middle of it”! That is why it can be surprising when you look at
SM: Chip design does not have to be a labor intensive process. FW: No it doesn’t, but it can be. You can very easily apply too many people. You need a lot of people for complex chips, so there is always a temptation to use too many people. The problem is you then run into
SM: What was significant about your time at AMD for both yourself and the industry? FW: It was a time that brought about the absolute consolidation and predominance of microprocessors. In the 1980’s the RISC processors and single chip processors where gaining importance but there were still mainframes in multiple architectures. By the mid 90’s
One trend occurring over the past decade is a reduction in the overall innovation by entrepreneurs in the semiconductor space. With the roll out of multi-core processors it is obvious that chokepoints in processing speed are going to lie in places like the bus and memory. That is where MetaRam comes into play. A small
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is the world’s largest semiconductor company. It shot into limelight riding the famous “Intel Inside” marketing and branding campaign in 1990. Today, with an employee strength of 90,300 Intel currently ranks 62nd in the Fortune 500 list on the back of FY/06 revenues of $35.38 billion. This is however down from its
SM: How much do people need to learn to be able to optimize programs on the Tilera chips? AA: That depends on the applications and the domain. The good news is you have gotten something working and running. Once you have done that, you can then try various optimizations. You don’t have to read 50