Soft Machines

Soft Machines, Inc. operated as a fabless semiconductor company, licensing and co-developing processor and system-on-a-chip (SoC) products before its acquisition. Founded in 2006 by former Intel engineers Mahesh Lingareddy and Mohammad A Abdallah, the company was established to address the performance-per-watt limitations that were becoming apparent in conventional microprocessor architectures. Lingareddy, who served as CEO, and Abdallah, the CTO, combined their experience from Intel and other tech startups, identifying an opportunity as the industry shifted towards multi-core designs. The company successfully navigated a challenging economic climate, securing over $200 million in funding from a diverse group of strategic investors, including Samsung Ventures, AMD, GlobalFoundries, and several sovereign wealth funds.

The company's core technology was the Variable Instruction Set Computing (VISC) architecture, a significant departure from standard CISC and RISC designs. VISC was engineered to enhance processor efficiency by creating 'virtual cores' and 'virtual hardware threads'. This architecture featured a virtual software layer that could take a single-threaded application and break it down into smaller tasks (threadlets). These threadlets were then dynamically allocated across the processor's physical resources, allowing a single application to utilize the full power of a multi-core chip, thereby improving instructions per clock (IPC) and overall performance-per-watt. This approach was designed to be scalable, targeting a wide range of markets from the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices to high-performance cloud computing platforms.

The business model was centered on intellectual property licensing, similar to that of ARM, allowing other companies to license the VISC architecture to create their own chip implementations. After operating for about a decade and demonstrating its technology, Soft Machines was acquired by Intel in 2016. Reports estimated the deal to be worth between $250 million and $300 million, providing an exit for its investors and integrating its team and technology into Intel's operations.

Keywords: VISC architecture, fabless semiconductor, processor design, system-on-a-chip, performance-per-watt, IP licensing, multi-core processing, virtual cores, Intel acquisition, microprocessor architecture