The late 1990s saw a wave of start-ups and big-company spin-offs offering novel processor architectures for DSP applications. While many of these companies fielded competent architectures, most never had a chance of success. Even when the industry was enjoying boom times, there just weren’t enough customers starting new chip and system designs to sustain a dozen new processor architectures alongside the many entrenched competitors.
Unfortunately for the upstart vendors, their prospective customers realized that most of the vendors wouldn’t survive in this overcrowded marketplace. That made customers wary of committing to new architectures. Nobody wants to get halfway into a three-year product development cycle only to have the processor vendor go belly-up. These fears hurt the sales of even the best-positioned new companies.
Although the recent industry downturn made matters worse for upstart vendors, it may have been just what the doctor ordered. Many of the weaker players were swept away, opening up market share for the remaining vendors. Fewer competitors meant less expectation of further consolidation, giving customers more confidence in the vendors that had survived. And the layoffs that swept through the industry left many chip and system companies more receptive to buying technology rather than inventing everything themselves.
But unfortunately for the surviving processor vendors, it appears that the market is again becoming overcrowded. Recent months have seen a torrent of announcements and pre-announcement rumblings from a second wave of processor start-ups. For the survivors of the last crash, the emergence of these new vendors is an unwelcome development. And given recent history, the arrival of this second wave comes as a real surprise. Did the entrepreneurs behind these new ventures just wake up from a five-year nap, unaware of the fate of their predecessors? Or have they carefully studied the pitfalls that consumed the earlier start-ups, and developed superior strategies?
One of the most common pitfalls that plagued the earlier wave of upstarts was an overemphasis on architecture. As industry events have demonstrated many times, a superior processor architecture is no guarantee of success. Yet today, if you ask the typical start-up processor vendor what will propel them to success, the usual answer is, in effect, “our unique, sophisticated, and elegant architecture.”
It’s painful to watch processor vendors repeat mistakes. Let’s hope, for the sake of the entire industry, that both the upstarts and the battle-scarred survivors will learn from recent history.
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