US-based semiconductor technology developer Soft Machines has raised more than $125m from investors including Samsung Venture Capital, electronics manufacturer Samsung and semiconductor maker AMD, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
AMD and Samsung’s corporate venturing subsidiary Samsung Venture Capital have been joined by Abu Dhabi state-backed fund Mubadala and private investors Gordon Campbell, Albert Yu and Richard Wirt, the latter two of which were formerly senior executives at Intel.
Founded in 2006, Soft Machines is developing technology that can break the instructions sent out by chips into smaller streams that are processed by its virtual cores. It had operated in stealth before CEO Mahesh Lingareddy spoke to the WSJ last week.
Soft Machines, which has 250 employees across Califronia, India and Russia, believes its system can generate two to four times higher performance per watt of power consumed.
The company plans to license out the technology to semiconductor manufacturers such as AMD, Intel and ARM, though if its performance can live up to its potential, it could also be an acqusition target for one of the big chipmakers.