Mannerisms

Over 15 years ago a Californian design house called Meridian Semiconductor went into an alliance with United Microelectronics Corporation to challenge Intel.

Yes indeedy, the same UMC we know today except that, at that time, it was a broadly-based merchant market supplier of memory, logic and analogue ICs.

Back in the early 1990s, the UMC-Meridian combination set out to manufacture and market x86 microprocessors in a direct challenge to Intel.

Kicking off with a 486, which it produced in quantities of several hundred thousand devices a month, UMC planned a DX Pentium P6 and P7 class microprocessors.

Back in 1984, John Hsuan, then president of UMC, told me: "With the 486SX we were six years behind Intel, with the DX we will be five years behind with the Pentium four years the P6 three to two years and the P7 one to two years behind."

For reasons which I have never understood, the UMC-Meridian challenge to Intel petered out, and shortly afterwards, UMC completely changed its business model from being a merchant market IC vendor to being a foundry.

Now, it could be graphics chip fabless semiconductor company NVidia which is taking a tilt at Intel’s crown.

Nvidia, has got together with Via Technologies which, in 1999 bought x86 clone-maker Cyrix from National Semiconductor and so has a legally validated x86 core.

Nvidia and Via have announced ‘The World’s Most Affordable Vista Premium PC’ a low-cost platform containing a Nvidia graphics processor and a lower-end CPU from Via.

It is aimed at the new emerging breed of tiny laptops like the Asus eee. This, of course, is a segment of the computer market being targeted by Intel with its Atom processors in another of Intel’s ‘diversifications’ (a.k.a. 'temporary aberrations').