Details emerge on Montalvo's Intel-challenging mystery processor

Upstart Montalvo Systems sure hasn't been talking much about exactly what it's doing with the $73 million in funding its received, but CNET News.com has now thankfully pulled back a bit of the mystery on the processor the company's betting its fortunes on. Most interestingly, CNET reports that the chip is much more in line with the Cell processor than Intel's or AMD's offerings, yet it will apparently be "theoretically" capable of running the same software as those processors. Specifically, the chip apparently won't be symmetrical, but rather employ a mix of high-performance cores and lower-performance cores on the same piece of silicon, which should ultimately cut power consumption by letting applications run only on the cores they need. As you might expect, however, the Montalvo folks are still keeping most of their secrets to themselves, and it seems likely that we won't get a really good idea of what they have in store until they're good and ready.

[Miles @ Feb 15th 2008 2:19PM]

But wouldn't the software have to support it?
I don't think they will become mainstream.

[nerdtalker @ Feb 15th 2008 2:38PM]

"Most interestingly, CNET reports that the chip is much more in line with the Cell processor than Intel's or AMD's offerings, yet it will apparently be "theoretically" capable of running the same software as those processors."

I interpret "same software" to mean "x86 architecture" or similar. That in fact means the software support is already built in.... RTFA?

[Miles @ Feb 15th 2008 2:41PM]

I mean the Low Power, High Power core feature.
Even if the software could run on the CPU, you'd still need to reprogram it to be able to use the new features.

[steviedu @ Feb 15th 2008 2:46PM]

Not as long as the instruction set of the processor is x86....they could extend the instruction set to include special instuctions for the decicated SPE's (a CELL term) and THEN the software would have to be specially written to take advantage of these. But maybe they have come up with a nice way to transform the x86 instructions to take advantage of their specialized architecture.

That is feasibly the only way to implement this new processor, since economically not many comapnies are going to rewrite and redistribute their codebase to take advantage of this new type of processor.

[Aguiluz @ Feb 15th 2008 2:40PM]

A mix of high performance cores and low performance ones? Will it be more practical to throttle down the clock speed of a core and increase it when needed?

[Miles @ Feb 15th 2008 2:51PM]

Then you'd slow everything down.
Plus processors already do this.
The low power high power core thing would allow you to run itunes on the low power core while the high power core is gaming or something.

[Aguiluz @ Feb 15th 2008 3:29PM]

No, no, no, no... I meant each individual core can be speed up or slow down, not everything goes all at once.

[monkfishbandana @ Feb 15th 2008 3:29PM]

..."allow you to run itunes on the low power core"...

You've never run iTunes, have you?

[steve @ Feb 15th 2008 2:42PM]

In other news, the sun will rise tommorow

[steve @ Feb 15th 2008 2:43PM]

Argh, fix your reply system, i was replying to Miles first comment

[Miles @ Feb 15th 2008 3:07PM]

I loled a bit.

[Mikey @ Feb 15th 2008 2:51PM]

How will it compare in cost?

[Allen @ Feb 15th 2008 3:22PM]

At this point Mikey we couldn't be sure, but if its a cell processor you can expect it to be expensive.

Still, I really wish there was a good competitor to Intel. AMD seems permanently mired in "Big Ideas, Little Delivery" and VIA, while making great smartphone processors, doesn't seem to have the desktop market in mind.

[TrueDis @ Feb 15th 2008 4:24PM]

Anyone remember Transmeta?

[Maytag @ Feb 15th 2008 4:52PM]

Montalvo's CEO Matt Perry does. He's the former CEO of Transmeta.....

[TrueDis @ Feb 15th 2008 4:57PM]

Well this is certainly destined for success then...

[taylor g @ Feb 15th 2008 5:03PM]

.......hypervisor and Virtualization can change all that

some people just think outside the box.......

good luck to them the more competion the better(the faster the better)