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.