Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

Summary

Together, the four founders of Beaverton startup AheadComputing spent nearly a century at Intel.They were among Intel’s top chip architects, working years in advance to develop new generations of microprocessors to power the computers of the future. Now they’re on their own, flying without a net, building a new class of microprocessor on an entirely different architecture from Intel’s. Founded a year ago, AheadComputing is trying to prove there’s a better way to design computer chips.“AheadComputing is doing the biggest, baddest CPU in the world,” said Debbie Marr, the company’s CEO.A CPU is a central processing unit, the brain inside a computer. Intel has dominated the CPU market for decades, selling processors based on an architecture the chipmaker owns, called x86.Today, the computing ecosystem is fragmenting as new standards emerge. That’s one of the reasons Intel is struggling, as computing mainstays like Apple and Google use rival architectures to design their own chips for PCs, smartphones and data centers. AheadComputing is betting on an open architecture called RISC-V — RISC stands for “reduced instruction set computer.” The idea is to craft a streamlined microprocessor that works more efficiently by doing fewer things, and doing them better than conventional processors. For AheadComputing’s founders and 80 employees, many of them also Intel alumni, it’s a major break from the kind of work they’ve been doing all their careers. They’ve left a company with more than 100,000 workers to start a business with fewer than 100.“Every person in this room,” Marr said, looking across a conference table at her colleagues, “we could have stayed at Intel. We could have continued to do very exciting things at Intel.” They decided they had a better chance at leading a revolution in semiconductor technology at a startup than at a big, established company like Intel. And AheadComputing could be at the forefront of renewal in Oregon’s semiconductor ecosystem.“We see this oppo...