Can you name every company selling x86 processors? Once upon the time many companies chased this product market. In the 1990s near Mission College Boulevard in Santa Clara, California, lay an x86 ghetto. East of the San Tomas Aquinas Creek stood Intel. West of it resided numerous little companies, such as IIT (which became VoIP company Vonage), Rise, and Transmeta—plus maybe some forgotten others.
That Rise CPU lives on! D&MP has a new twin-core (asymmetric multiprocessing, not SMP) chip, the Vortex86EX3. Jean-Luc Aufranc discusses it on his CNX Software site. In addition to the cores, the EX3 integrates a full complement of PC peripherals (but not a VGA controller) and other interfaces useful to industrial designers, including SDIO, ADC, Ethernet, USB, CAN FD/XL, and PCIe. It also meets the industrial –40°C to 85°C temperature requirements. In a sign of how little clock rates have improved in recent decades, the new chip’s CPUs run at 1.2 GHz. That’s the same neighborhood as some recent Intel processors’ base clocks.
We’re curious how much Vortex customers value the performance upgrade the EX3 provides over its predecessors, such as the 600 MHz twin-core Vortex86EX2. The main value we see is a newer DRAM interface supporting LPDDR4, which should address problems customers have sourcing older DRAM. The EX3 provides a software-compatible upgrade that allows them to maintain production, albeit with a redesign. Customers seeking greater performance or other semblance of modernity have options but may need to sacrifice x86 compatibility.
For a story about another hardly known x86 supplier, see an XPU.news story about Hygon.