OPTi

» see opti.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In September 2001 the board of OPTi Inc. voted unanimously to dissolve the company, subject to approval in November. The trade press headline was Opti Opts to Close Its Doors. By then there was not much left to close: the chipset business had been abandoned in 1999 for a line of notebook microcontrollers that barely broke even, and the address had moved from Milpitas to Palo Alto somewhere in the retreat.

The company started in 1989, founded on a shoestring by people who had just left Chips and Technologies, and its first products were three VLSI chipsets for 386SX and 486 motherboards. The pitch was component count. A 486 board running at 40 MHz took a pile of support chips to work, and OPTi's job was to collapse that pile into something a manufacturer could solder down in about twenty parts. Chips and Technologies sued them in 1991 over two memory patents and lost in federal court the following year.

What they were selling was never a product anybody asked for by name. You bought a computer, or you bought a motherboard, and the chipset was two or three squares of plastic already soldered to it with a part number on top. At its best in the early 1990s OPTi had 235 employees standing behind $164 million of annual sales in that invisible layer.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the part nobody chose ~

Machines reached Turkey in the mid nineties mostly through local assemblers, which means the specification that mattered was whatever the shop had in the back. The processor was on the sticker and the RAM was in the price, and underneath both of those sat a chipset decided by a purchasing choice nobody ever explained to the buyer. If you grew up with a beige box in that period you have almost certainly used an OPTi part and have no way to confirm it short of taking the lid off and reading the die.

There is one place the choice became visible. OPTi's Viper-M chipset supported Cyrix's 6x86 and AMD's K5 as well as Intel's Pentium, at a time when Intel's own chipsets supported the Pentium and nothing else. If you were buying a non-Intel processor in 1995, somebody in the supply chain had to pick a board that would hold it, and that was the market OPTi had left.

~ the intel problem ~

Intel started ramping its own chipset manufacturing in 1994 and the market reshaped around that in roughly one product cycle. Intel took sixty six percent of Pentium-class chipset sales against OPTi's ten. Taiwan's SiS sat on seven. Intel named OPTi as its nearest competitor in the segment, which is a flattering way of saying there were only scraps underneath. Kenny Liu stepped down as chief executive that year and stayed on as chairman.

The company kept finding corners for a while. Notebook chipsets did better than the desktop, with design wins at Toshiba and Hewlett-Packard for the PCI-based Viper-N between December 1994 and the middle of 1995. OPTi bought a sound chip designer called MediaChips in 1993 and shipped the OPTi 929 audio controller off its patents. Then in 1997 Cirrus Logic's Crystal Semiconductor subsidiary sued over the mixed-signal parts of the Viper-M audio and won, leaving OPTi and a Singaporean co-defendant to split a twenty million dollar judgment at the turn of the decade. Sales had all but vanished before the ruling landed.

~ the second OPTi ~

After a year of dormancy the dissolved company sold its semiconductor business and assets to an unaffiliated outfit called OPTi Technologies, in September 2002. Bernie Marren, who had run the original through its last three years, took over the new one, and it promptly renamed itself OPTi Inc. Nothing over the door had changed. Everything behind it had.

The second OPTi made nothing. It licensed patents and sued people. That had already started before the handover, with a suit against Intel which settled in 2001 for $13.5 million and the purchase of the patents behind it. Nvidia was next, from early 2006, and had paid $14.75 million in judgments and settlements by 2009. In January 2007 OPTi took Apple to the Eastern District of Texas over a predictive cache-snooping patent and won $21.7 million, of which $19 million was the infringement and $2.7 million was interest. Apple filed an appeal in December 2009 and dropped it a year later, the day before the court was due to hear it. By 2010 the whole operation was three people including Marren, and it ran on that footing until 2020.

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