Startup Describes New Core, SoC

Shasta aims to rise above today's processors

by Rick Merritt - EETimes, Oct. 07, 2015 – 

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- A year after its debut, microprocessor startup Soft Machines described in rough terms the first two products it will deliver in mid-2016, a licensable processor core and an SoC using it. The dual-core 16nm Shasta will run at up to 2 GHz and outperform existing chips with superior performance/watt, but the startup will not say which two instruction sets it will support through emulation.

Microprocessor startups have become a rarity given the industry is consolidating around a handful of large ecosystems, mainly centered on Intel's x86 and Arm cores. Investors have pumped a whopping $175 million into Soft Machines to date in hopes it has a rare break-out technology.

Last October, Soft Machines demoed a dual-core, 28nm prototype running at about 400 MHz and outperforming Intel Haswell and Arm 32-bit cores. At the time, it made no commitment to specific products but did say its next target was to deliver quad-core devices running at 1.5 GHz.

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