Sun Taps Splain to Run Microelectronics, Buys Montalvo Carcass

Published: May 1, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A little more than a month ago, Sun Microsystems announced that David Yen, who was in charge of its Sparc processor development efforts off and on for many years, was leaving the company to take a job at Juniper Networks. Sun announced this week that it has tapped Mike Splain, a heavy hitter in the chip world who was given the interim job in addition to his duties as chief technology officer for Sun's Systems Group.

To one way of thinking, the appointment of Splain is a de facto re-merger of the recently spun out Microelectronics Group and the Systems Group, since the executive vice president of the chip unit is also the guy in charge of the technology roadmap for the system unit now. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, especially since Sun is trying to cut costs and even Yen had to do double duty for a while when Sun merged the chip and systems units a few years back.

"Mike is an outstanding engineer and an outstanding leader at Sun, someone who brings together people and ideas to create a wealth of opportunity," said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's president and chief executive officer, in a statement announcing the appointment. "I'm thrilled to have him join my team, and looking forward to another decade of microelectronics innovation to differentiate Sun and our customers in the marketplace."

Splain was, of course, already on Sun's team, and hence on Schwartz's, but he was not sitting in at the high-level meetings where the course of the company can be--and sometimes is--changed on a dime.

Splain has a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Connecticut, and got his start in the IT industry 25 years ago. Splain has worked at Ridge Computers, Vitesse Semiconductor, Encore Computer (acquired by Sun), and Digital Equipment (acquired by Hewlett-Packard, and he joined Sun 20 years ago and has rose through the engineering ranks to become a Sun Fellow, a chief engineer for Systems Group, and its chief technology officer. Splain's expertise is the development of microprocessors and high-end computer systems. He was also the head of development for the MAJC Java acceleration processors that Sun positioned to take over the world a decade ago but which ended up inside graphics cards for a while, if my memory serves. Splain takes the reins just as Sun is ramping up its "Niagara" Sparc T1 and T2 family of multicore processors for entry Sparc iron, has pushed out its high-end "Rock" UltraSparc RK processors to a 2H 2009 delivery (a year or more behind schedule), and is transitioning its chip fab partnership away from Texas Instruments and toward Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

In an interesting side event for the Microelectronics Group late last week (and a day after Splain was officially put in charge of the Microelectronics Group), Sun confirmed through a report in the Wall Street Journal that it has bought the intellectual property of stealth startup Montalvo Systems. That company, which was founded in Santa Clara, California, by Matt Perry, who was chief executive officer at ill-fated X86 clone chip maker Transmeta, and was reportedly working on low-power X64-compatbile processors with an asymmetrical architecture akin to IBM's Cell Power chips, putting two powerful and two skinnier cores on a single chip, allowing it to dial up and down to handle various levels of workload.

There's some chatter in the venture world that Sun might be interested in using the Montalvo assets as some kind of level with newfound partner Intel (which you can read about here), but that doesn't make a lot of sense considering that Sun wants to push billions of dollars in its "Galaxy" server line. With Montalvo having burnt through $73 million in cash in a relatively short period of time, Sun probably got whatever technology the company had created for pennies on the dollar. And with Intel itself not being able to acquire the assets, given its monopoly position, and Advanced Micro Devices not having enough cash to buy a cup of coffee at a Starbucks in Silicon Valley these days, Sun is more likely doing Intel a favor by acquiring the Montalvo assets. If Sun and Intel don't already have a cross-licensing chip development agreement, which would allow Intel to see all the Montalvo goodies, you can sure bet the press release is in the works. Sun will, of course, weave whatever ideas it can into its own Sparc platforms, too.

One last thing: Just to close the loop, Yen has taken the job as executive vice president of emerging technologies at Juniper. He will report directly to Scott Kriens, chairman and chief executive officer of the networking equipment provider, which is trying to position itself at the crossroads where networking meets high performance computing and various Web-style applications. Yen has expertise in the supercomputer field as well as in chip and systems software design.

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