David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…So without getting too into the details, typically computers, as we know the desktop computers, laptops and servers use x86 architecture from Intel. There were efforts made kind of starting or at least most popularized by ARM to do a different chip architecture with a different instruction of set of assembly language that was more restricted but a lot lower power. Intel has had attempts over the years to come up with lower power chips. The Atom processor is a great example of this. But the reason why ARM chips in our iPhones, iPads and many other things have come to be extremely popular in the last few years is because as we moved to mobile devices, we have stricter power requirements when we cannot plug things into the wall. We’ll get into this in a minute when we actually get into P.A. Semi. But that’s exactly what Dan became known for, Dan Dobberpuhl, as a serving expert on pushing the limits of this power to performance tradeoff in chip design. So this first strong arm was kind of too early for the market in this and so he leaves Intel in the late ‘90s and actually founds another company before starting P.A. Semi. That’s a company called SiByte. SiByte is focused on making chips for – this is sort of like the run up to the internet bubble, making chips for routers and networking gear because everybody is, you know, these are like the 3Com days and everybody is obsessed with the buildout of internet infrastructure. So, the big market for chips is actually in Cisco, 3Com routers. SiByte sort of like hits the timing exactly right for the market, ends up getting acquired by Broadcom, the big chip company, public chip company, before they even release their product for over $2 billion in late 2000. Talk about being in the right place at the right time. And this is great. This is where Dan’s textbook, turns out, helps in this acquisition because the CEO of Broadcom gave a quote to the Wall Street Journal about the acquisition. So, he first came across Mr. Dobberpuhl in college when he studied the engineer’s textbook on processor design and he quotes that SiByte has the best engineering team he’s ever seen. So, there you go. Write a textbook, get acquired for $2 billion. It’s that simple. So, Dan stays at Broadcom after the acquisition for a couple of years. But late 2003, he sort of sees mobile coming, he’s ready to leave and try the low power starter company to do low power chips again, and he starts Palo Alto Semiconductor. They end up raising money right out of the gate and then threw a couple rounds from Bessemer, Venrock, Highland, and then later on, Texas Instruments actually invest a lot of money in the company. They’re working on the sort of like very low-power but combined with high-performance chips. But they’re initially using the power instruction set architecture which, as Ben was mentioning, x86. And ARM, that’s a third instruction set that folks might remember was initially used by Macs before Steve Jobs made the famous announcement that Macs were going to switch to Intel. Yeah. Which this all happened, it’s sort of interesting confluence of time where that was announced I believe in 2005 onstage at Macworld, the first Macs emerged in 2006 and then in 2007, they were fully moved over to Intel.…

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