The pretender to the throne of low-cost microprocessor design, Rise Technology Inc, has signed one of its first deals – with Acer Laboratories Inc (ALI). The two will team up to produce a chipset for the notebook computer market, combining Rise’s mP6 CPU with ALI’s Aladdin V mobile chipset. Santa Clara, California-based Rise is eyeing the increasingly lucrative sub $1,000 PC and notebook market with its mP6 processor, claiming better performance than the equivalent Pentium II chip and saying that its chip offers attractive features for the target users, such as 3D graphics, soft modem and DVD support. ALI’s Aladdin V mobile is a socket 7 chipset with a 100MHz CPU bus and support for Intel Corp’s advanced graphics port (AGP). There are no details yet on when the chipset will be released, or how much it will cost. Some industry watchers have expressed doubt about the viability of Rise’s business model, it has no in-house manufacturing facilities and will farm out all production work to third party foundry partners. A spokeswoman for the company admitted that pressure was on to announce foundry partners – so crucial to the company’s strategy – and said that the first of them would be revealed in January of next year. She refused to divulge which chip manufacturer the partnership was with, saying only that it was a major contract and that the foundry partner had an Intel cross-licensing deal.
