Meet Atiq Raza. When AMD
This week, Raza reconnected with his past, as the startup he founded after his AMD days acquired the Alchemy processor line, which happens to be AMD's family of embedded chips based on the MIPS architecture. Raza Microelectronics, otherwise known as RMI, may be small and privately held, but with this agreement, it just gained a sizable user base and some well-respected technology that generally complements its own in-house designs for communications equipment.
AMD, in return, is investing in RMI and launching an engineering partnership to support RMI's designs on the AMD Torrenza platform. That's a fancy name for a server computing design philosophy that allows specialized co-processors to access other system resources very efficiently through HyperTransport and PCI Express interconnects, or even by plugging directly into spare CPU sockets. No specific product announcements have been made yet, but it's reasonable to expect RMI's advanced networking and communications chips to take advantage of these platform efficiencies to improve networking performance and feature sets.
The Alchemy acquisition should give RMI the ability to build tightly integrated mini-systems that can do more than just run an Ethernet port or two. Built-in network management, security, and monitoring should be a snap, and the company may well have some plans I haven't thought of, too. With the engineering talent at RMI's disposal, it should have a few original ideas up its sleeve.
As for AMD, the company seems dead-set on focusing on its core competencies in the mainstream CPU arena. The flash operations have been spun off into Spansion
Raza has surrounded himself with impressive talent, mostly hired away from other chipmakers such as Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments
Want to know more about Rule Breaking investing? Take a free, 30-day trial today.
Further Foolish reading:
Fool contributor Anders Bylund keeps disqualifying himself from buying any Cisco stock. Foolish disclosure rules with an iron fist, and he doesn't own any of the stocks mentioned today. Intel is a Motley Fool Inside Value selection.