Quantum Effect Devices
The three founders, Tom Riordan, Earl Killian and Ray Kunita, were senior managers at MIPS Computer Systems Inc.This was during the ACE initiative from Microsoft to support multiple RISC architectures for their new Windows NT operating system.After successful products introductions like the RM5200 and the RM7000, under its own "RISCMark" label, the company had its IPO on 1 February 2000.[1] The company was acquired by PMC-Sierra in October 2000; at the time, Quantum Effect Devices was valued in a stock swap worth $2.3 billion according to one estimate.He believed that the company would survive to the age when semiconductor geometry dimensions would become so small that quantum effects would dominate circuit behavior.The founders of QED, who were previously involved with the R4000, felt that the large device was too complicated and that a simpler implementation would give a better price/performance ratio.The R4650 achieved a smaller die area by cutting the caches in half, only implementing single precision floating-point.It implemented a high-performance, fully pipelined floating point unit with multiply–accumulate capability and a SRT divider.Since the PowerPC 603 was then the most power-efficient chip from the AIM alliance, the name of this device was chosen to reflect its low-cost and low-power characteristics.Once those Apple projects were cancelled, Motorola stopped the development of the 603q even though QED had received first silicon samples and they were functional.The Apollo microprocessor core that was part of the RM9x00 had its pipeline lengthened to 7 stages to enable higher operating frequencies.