Here's a bit of advice for anyone who's considering starting an x86 processor design shop from scratch: don't. The case of secretive chip startup Montalvo is illustrative here: we got wind of the low-power x86 play's existence in February, and this past Friday brought news that the company is being acquired by Sun Microsystems.

Different reports have the company burning through between $73 million and $100 million in VC funding in its attempts to bring to market an x86 processor design for portables that features asymmetric cores—complex cores for heavy-duty tasks, and simpler (and power-hungry) core for lightweight tasks.

Montalvo faced long odds in its quest to carve out a niche for itself in the Intel-dominated x86 market. In my earlier coverage of the company's plans, my take on asymmetric chip multiprocessing as a power-saving "silver bullet" was this: "if someone actually does come up with a way to remix processor microarchitecture and/or the cache hierarchy that gives them, say, a 15 percent or greater performance-per-watt boost over Intel on mainstream consumer workloads, I'll eat my hat. And if the company that buys that winning lottery ticket happens to be Montalvo, I'll eat your hat."

So the Montalvo sale is good news for me, because it means there is no hat-eating in my immediate future.

Like Apple's recent PA Semi acquisition, Sun's purchase of Montalvo is all about engineering talent and intellectual property. Sun gave a statement to CNet which confirms that any worthwhile ideas and technology that they can wring out of Montalvo will be rolled into future Sun processors.

Part of Sun's statement to CNET also appears to give credence to a rumor, reported by The Register, that Montalvo was snapped up by Sun for the paltry sum of $5 million. "We are not disclosing the terms of the deal as it is not material with respect to earnings per share," Sun told CNet. So the deal wasn't big enough to have the kind of impact on the publicly-traded company's EPS that would force it to announce the purchase price; of course, this doesn't mean that the $5 million number is accurate, but it does suggest that the total consideration was quite low.

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