Over at EE Times they are reporting that AMD is buying Alchemysemi. This startup has been designing low-powered, 32-bit MIPS processors as of late, but has had funding problems, and AMD is bailing them out by simply purchasing them.

An interesting point to note is that Alchemysemi was founded by many Ex-DEC engineers -- the same group who designed the Alpha Architecture -- arguably the cleanest and fastest design yet made (but has since been killed). Many of these engineers also made their way to AMD, and Dirk Meyer, one of the head guys for the Alpha project, was the head guy for AMD's Athlon processor.

The last time AMD bought a microprocessor company was when they bought out NexGen, who had just designed the NX686. This design was then taken by AMD, made to work with the Socket 7 standard, added some more L1 cache, and introduced the chip as the AMD K6 processor.

We can only hope that this new acquisition helps AMD, to keep competition healthy between AMD and Intel.

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