By ASHLEE VANCE
Published: August 15, 2010
A group of investors, including companies from the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates, has formed in a bid to disrupt one of Intel’s most lucrative franchises.
The companies have put $48 million into Smooth-Stone, a start-up based in Austin, Tex., betting that it can modify low-power smartphone chips to run servers, the computers in corporate data centers. If successful, Smooth-Stone would undermine Intel’s server-chip business and offer companies, especially those with vast data centers like Google, Amazon.com, Facebook and Microsoft, enormous energy cost savings.
Acknowledging the David vs. Goliath struggle ahead, the company’s name is a nod to David’s weapon. “He approached things in a totally different way,” said Barry Evans, the new venture’s chief executive. “His approach was efficient — one shot.”
The risks of taking on Intel run so high that financing for this type of chip start-up has almost completely disappeared. This diverse consortium of companies plans to tackle the titan Intel by spreading the risk.
Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners represent the traditional venture capitalists behind Smooth-Stone. They have been joined by ARM in Britain, the most prominent designer of smartphone chip technology, and the chip makerTexas Instruments.
In an eye-catching move, the Advanced Technology Investment Company, or ATIC, will contribute as well. Based in Abu Dhabi, ATIC has already poured billions of dollars into the chip industry in the last two years. It took over the chip manufacturing business of Intel’s main rival, Advanced Micro Devices, through its majority ownership of GlobalFoundries, which has chip plants throughout the world.
“Those of us that are crazy enough to want to continue to invest have been looking for a new model that will make start-up chip investing work,” said Ken Lawler, a partner at Battery Ventures. “The answer is this collaboration between traditional venture groups and strategic partners.”
All of these companies now share a singular focus — power. Or rather, less power. ARM chips operate on less electricity and emit less heat. These attributes could allow companies to cram many more ARM chips in a data center, saving on space and power compared with traditional server chips.
Smooth-Stone has set to work modifying the ARM chips found in the most popular smartphones to handle jobs typically done on server computers.
Just a few years ago, the technology industry would have considered such a proposal daft. Servers do heavy work running business software and require serious horsepower.
As it happens, chips based on Intel’s architecture have such horsepower and tend to run faster than anything else on the market. These chips churn away inside 90 percent of the servers sold every year, leaving 10 percent of the market for specialized chips made to handle mainframe-like operations.
But companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon.com and Microsoft buy servers by the thousands as they try to keep up with demand from Internet users. They have found that power consumption, even more than raw horsepower, is their top concern, since their electricity bills swell each time the delivery truck shows up with crates of new servers.
And much of the software needed to present a Web page requires far less computing muscle than typical business software. So why rev up a Ferrari when a Prius will do the trick?
Mr. Evans, who worked at Intel for almost two decades, said ARM chips have matured to the point where they give certain customers a better balance of cost, performance and power consumption than Intel chips.
“The ARM products have their roots in the superhigh-volume cellphone space,” Mr. Evans said. “You have a lot of momentum around software because of that, and the costs of the chips are at that consumer electronics price point.”
Historically, Intel’s chips have consumed a great deal of power, and many start-ups have tried to seize on this weakness, primarily in the laptop market. These well-promoted start-ups have tended to burn through large amounts of investment capital only to get clobbered by Intel’s marketing and engineering might.
And Intel does not always play fair. The company has paid close to $3 billion in the last 18 months in fines and settlements tied to charges of anticompetitive behavior.
Apart from chip design, a major part of Smooth-Stone’s battle for survival will hinge on software. Most software makers write applications specifically for Intel’s chips. They would need to rework their products to run on the ARM chips that have a different architecture.
Linley Gwennap, a well-known chip analyst and founder of the Linley Group analyst company, said that Web companies might just be willing to do this extra work if it translated into power savings.
Many of these companies, including Google and Facebook, already customize a great deal of their software and release it for anyone to use.
“You don’t need these chips to run 18,000 different applications like standard server chips,” Mr. Gwennap said. “You’re talking about specialized applications.”
Mr. Gwennap added that Intel can charge higher prices for its chips because of its reputation and dominant position in the market. But a company with a true low-price, low-power alternative could force Intel’s hand.
“Intel’s profit margins are vulnerable to a sneak attack from underneath,” Mr. Gwennap said.
Another start-up called SeaMicro recently unveiled a server aimed at Web companies that runs on Intel’s Atom chips, which typically go into low-cost laptops and hand-held devices.
“Servers absolutely require raw performance, complete software consistency, energy efficiency and unquestionable reliability,” said Nick Knupffer, an Intel spokesman. “Outside of good battery life for single-function cellphones, it’s unclear how well ARM-based chips will do in these key areas."
ATIC, backed by oil riches, has demonstrated a willingness to take on Intel even after watching its close partner A.M.D. get trampled time and again.
GlobalFoundries, the company majority owned by ATIC, is one of a handful of foundries, or companies that make chips for other companies that design them. Intel is the last mainstream chip maker to both design and manufacture its own products.
Chip start-ups could use a friend with deep pockets. The number of venture-backed chip companies in the United States has fallen from 94 in 2000, to 31 in 2005 to just two in 2009, as the cost and complexity of building chips has risen.
Analysts expect it will take Smooth-Stone about two years to deliver its new products.