SiliconValley.com Microsoft chip lab: absolutely fabless

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

Microsoft chip lab: absolutely fabless: There's a new upstart in the  
semiconductor business: Microsoft. The company, which has long relied  
on Intel for its chips, has quietly established its own research  
labs, with an eye toward designing the chip that will power the next  
Xbox gaming console. Headed up by Xerox PARC veteran Charles "Alto"  
Thacker and longtime Microsoft researcher Rich Draves, the Computer  
Architecture Group, as it's tentatively named, will essentially  
transform Microsoft into a fabless semiconductor design firm,  
allowing it to explore new ideas in system design and more closely  
control the integration of hardware and software (I can't even begin  
to imagine what this heralds for DRM). "This is a historic time in  
the computer industry," said David Patterson, a computer scientist at  
the University of California, Berkeley. "We're in the middle of a  
revolutionary change toward parallel computing that will absolutely  
involve both hardware and software."

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