Charlie Cheng, CEO Lexra Inc says that if its MIPS RISC clone strategy becomes too much of a pain in the butt due to Silicon Graphics Inc’s new-found litigiousness it will simply dump the instruction set for something else, probably PowerPC (CI No 3,388). That would certainly bring a smile to IBM Corp’s face but Cheng says he’ll persevere with the company’s 32-bit MIPS core for now. SGI’s suing Lexra for false advertising and trademark infringement – not patent infringement – for claiming its processor is MIPS-compatible. Lexra removed four Cobol compiler- dependent instructions which, after consulting with MIT’s RISC pioneers, it figured it didn’t need. Performance shot up 30% but SGI says Lexra can’t claim a MIPS subset is MIPS-compatible but then compatibility has no legal definition. In addition it thinks it customers will be getting a more up-to-date microprocessor design than that available from SGI or its embedded MIPS partners such as LSI Logic Corp. The company engineered the LXR-4080 MIPS I architecture RISC core using books and papers Cheng said he bought in bookstores. He said Lexra approached SGI about licensing the MIPS core and received a letter on January 22nd stating SGI’s desire to sell it the license at a meeting it was to arrange. Cheng says SGI canceled the meeting and didn’t give it any reason. He feels SGI is running scared claiming that if SGI licensed Lexra it would be jeopardizing relationships with its other MIPS partners including the likes of Toshiba and NEC. It doesn’t face the same copyright issues as the Intel Corp cloners such as Advanced Micro Devices Inc because there is no microcode associated with RISC designs. Cheng claims customers which have licensed its design – and have the chip manufactured by IBM or other foundries – will have electronic games using the parts in shops by Christmas. He claims cable modems, set-tops and palmtop computers using the LXR-4080 RISC core chips will be available mid-1999. LSI’s equivalent part runs at 70MHz compared with Lexra’s 0.25 micron, 100MHz design. NEC’s runs at 50MHz to 70MHz while Toshiba’s part is at 50MHz. The 20-person Lexra says it based itself in Waltham, Massachusetts to be as far away from SGI as possible. It expects to break even soon. Its chief competition is the Advanced RISC Machine embedded designs.
