Sun salvages what's left of a multicore CPU developer

Sun Microsystems has purchased Montalvo Systems, a struggling startup company that attempted to design a mobile, energy-efficient multi-core chip that never made it to production, a Sun spokesperson confirmed.

"Sun has acquired the technology assets of Montalvo Systems," a Sun PR person confirmed to BetaNews late Friday afternoon. "The assets will be integrated into Sun's Microelectronics business unit."

The SPARC technology leader officially closed the deal on April 21, but did not issue a public press release and has not yet disclosed financial terms of the deal.

Montalvo reportedly generated more than $75 million in funds from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but burned through almost $100M in the initial stages of its business. It recently stated another $100M would be necessary to create a working product for testing. After it was unable to secure additional funding at the end of last month, the company cut two thirds of its staff.

Instead of following in the footsteps of AMD and Intel, Montalvo's chips were supposed to be asymmetric cores, meaning both high-performance and low-performance cores would share the same silicon wafer. This would help reduce power consumption because applications not requiring high amounts of power could be distributed to the low-performance cores, while other applications can be assigned to the high-performance cores.

Rather than try to compete with Intel and AMD in the x86 processor market, Sun will integrate Montalvo's technology into its own SPARC and UltraSPARC line of microelectronics.