Sun Microsystems is negotiating to buy Montalvo Systems, the chip start-up that has concocted a chip for portables, according to sources.
The deal follows a major round of lay-offs at Montalvo. The company, which had earlier raised US$73 million, has been seeking around US$100 million from additional investors. Investors, however, have shied away.
Neither Sun nor Montalvo has confirmed the negotiations or the state of the transaction. Any deal may fade away before anything gets signed. But this is what we know at the moment from well-placed sources.
Montalvo has designed a chip that can run the same software as processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. What makes the chip different is that the four-core chip from Montalvo is asymmetrical. Two of the cores are high-powered cores for running intense applications while two are more energy efficient. Montalvo has submitted several patents on its ideas and some of the applications have recently become public.
Although Montalvo has designed a chip and has lined up Fujitsu to produce it, it does not yet have a piece of silicon in hand.
Sun buys chips from both Intel and AMD. However, Sun does produce UltraSparc chips and tries to use these chips to enhance its high-end servers.
