Exponential Technology

~ the obit ~

The X704 was built for the Macintosh market, and when Apple's own finances wobbled it was aimed instead at the Macintosh clone makers, a category that needs explaining twice over: first that Apple once licensed other companies to build Macs at all, and then that hardly any of those machines reached Turkey. Exponential's whole customer list sat on the far side of that arrangement. Nothing it manufactured was ever going to appear in a shop I could walk into, and the argument that destroyed it was conducted entirely in San Jose.

The company started in 1993 as Renaissance Microsystems, founded by George Taylor and Jim Blomgren, with Rick Shriner as chief executive. The plan was to beat Motorola and IBM at their own architecture by building PowerPC chips in BiCMOS, using fast ECL circuits for the logic and CMOS for the memory structures. Hitachi fabricated them. The product was the X704, advertised at 533 MHz at a time when the PowerPC 604e inside Apple's own machines ran at 233.

The first silicon came back at roughly 400 MHz. That is still a large number next to 233, but it was not the number on the slides, and the shortfall gave Motorola room to tell Apple that its own roadmap would close the gap soon enough. Apple did not need telling twice. It had its own finances to survive in 1997, and depending on a small supplier for a critical part is a risk a struggling company declines.

There was a second problem, and this one had no engineering answer. Apple had never licensed the ROM that Macintosh clone makers needed in order to use an X704, so the clone vendors Exponential had turned to, Power Computing and UMAX among them, could not ship the chip even when they wanted it. Then Apple closed the clone program altogether, and the last possible customer went with it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fifteenth of may ~

CNET's wire of 15 May 1997 is the cleanest record of the ending. Exponential was closing its PowerPC operations that day, confirmed by the company, a week after cutting a quarter of its workforce and days after Apple executives said publicly that they would not use the X704. Phil Schiller, then running desktop and server product marketing at Apple, put it plainly: there was no significant performance advantage over what Apple was already getting from the G3.

Rick Bergman, Exponential's vice president of marketing, was quoted in the same piece saying the opportunity in PowerPC no longer justified going forward, and that the revenue was real but too far out to keep the company going. Exponential had failed to raise enough to put the X704 into volume production. A source at one clone manufacturer told CNET that Apple had tried to keep the processor for itself, a comment made the day before the shutdown.

Exponential sued Apple in September 1997 for breaking supply contracts and interfering with its sales to clone vendors, asking 500 million dollars. Wired put the company's losses on the Macintosh effort at 40 million.

~ what Apple bought in 2010 ~

Not everything stopped on 15 May. The second design team, in Austin under Paul Nixon, had been building a BiCMOS x86 processor, and it continued as EVSX. In 2000 it renamed itself Intrinsity. In April 2010 Apple bought Intrinsity, whose engineers had worked on the ARM core inside the A4, the first processor Apple put its own name on.

So the design group Apple stranded in 1997 arrived inside Apple thirteen years later, working on the chip line that came to matter far more than the X704 ever could have.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »