Smooth Stone is well Armed and Backed with 48M
By Azam on August 16, 2010Founded in January 2008, Smooth‐Stone brings ultra‐low power mobile phone technology to the datacenter. Smooth-Stone has brought together leading engineers with experience in volume and blade server platforms, mainframes, server CPUs, networking processors, telecom infrastructure, and high performance cellular application processors and cell phone system-on-chips. With depth in both hardware and software design and development the Smooth-Stone team is uniquely positioned to deliver a complete low power solution. the ARM architecture is pefect in combining the server side with the proliferation of new devices and mobile technology.
The ARM architecture chips will allow clients to quickly and easily port their key backend software to non-x 64 architecture taking advantage of low-power and performance of a server-centric ARM design.
Alternative power-efficient Power processors PA Semi quietly disappeared into the Apple realm and was never to be heard from again.
Smooth-Stone announced that it has lined up $48m in equity to take a run at Intel’s server business. ARM Holdings, the holding company that licenses the ARM chip architecture that has myriad designs and arguably the most vibrant and energy-efficient chip designs in the world at the moment, has ponied up some of that cash, as has Advanced Technology Investment Company, the investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi that bought the foundry business from Intel nemesis Advanced Micro Devices last year.
Other Smooth-Stone backers include chip maker Texas Instruments and Equity Funds Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Highland Capital Partners.
Smooth-Stone was founded in January 2008 to bring cell phone power efficiency to the data center, and it seeks to do this by building up the ARM processors into a proper server chip. Barry Evans, who ran Intel’s low-power x86 and XScale ARM clone business, is Smooth-Stone’s chief executive officer. (Intel acquired the StrongARM RISC processor business from failing Digital Equipment Corp in 1998, and in 2006 sold off that XScale business to chip maker Marvell for $600m.)
Evans is joined by co-founder Larry Wikelius, who was at Opteron server maker Newisys, which sparked to life and generated $450m in server revenues before burning out, and David Borland, who is vice president of hardware engineering who has been in charge of chip designs at Marvell, Intel, and AMD.
Categories : Tech, WirelessTags : AMD, apple, ARM, Barry Evans, Battery Ventures, David Borland, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Prtners, Intel, Larry Wikelius, Smooth Stone, TI