XMOS, the microprocessor start-up founded by Transputer inventor
Professor David May FRS, has received funding of £625,000 from
Prelude following which Prelude has a 22.3 per cent stake in the
company.
“It gets us to the next stage of product development," XMOS CEO
James Foster, told EW, “we are awfully excited. The
momentum is building now. It’s great.”
“It’s gets us off the starting block”, said Russell Haggar, a
partner at Esprit Capital which manages Prelude, who has been
appointed to the XMOS board, “Prelude is delighted to be investing
in XMOS. It is led by a world-class team who have created a
technology which we expect will become a core part of the
electronics industry.”
David May will not give any hints about the XMOS architecture but
is generally concerned with the backward state of microprocessor
technology.
“There’ve been no fundamental architectural enhancements for a long
time. There really is a technology issue now. Some of this stuff
just isn’t right,” May told EW.
"We still have x86s and Riscs," said May. "They are 30
years old, and they were never designed to be applied to what we’re
applying them to today, to things like media processing,
cryptography, and 3-D graphics. If you look at what you’d design
from scratch from today to run big servers it ain’t one of those;
and if you look at the other side, the client side, what you’d
design for that ain’t one of those either.”
This is the second tranche of funding for XMOS which had some seed
capital when it was spun off from Bristol University last year.