Server processor startup raises $240 million
This comes after a Series A of $53 million raised in November 2019 (see Former Apple, Google hardware engineers create processor startup).
The company was founded in February 2019 by John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams, with the goal of creating the world’s leading server processor.
Bruno and Gulati held key hardware design positions at Google prior to forming Nuvia. CEO Williams had been Apple’s chief CPU architect for nearly a decade prior to forming Nuvia. Williams was subsequently hit with a law suit that claimed he worked and communicated on the formation of Nuvia prior to leaving Apple in breach of his employment contract.
The round was led by Mithril Capital in partnership with Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai, founders of Marvell Technology Group; funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC., and Temasek, with additional participation from Atlantic Bridge, Redline Capital, Capricorn Investment Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Mayfield, Nepenthe LLC and WRVI Capital.
Nuvia is designing a CPU core called ‘Phoenix’ and an SoC called ‘Orion’. These will be based on the ARM architecture but include an overhaul of the CPU pipeline, the company has said in a blog.
The company is looking to double the performance per watt of the Apple 13 Lightning and Apple 12X processors in the 2 to 4 watts per core region. The blog compares Phoenix against variety of Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and other processors. It also references Ampere’s Altron processor and Amazon’s Graviton 2.
“We realize the companies we have measured against in these tests are not standing still and will have new products in the market over the next 18 months. That said, we believe that even with significant performance gains – of more than 20 percent – with new CPU architectures, we will continue to hold a clear position of leadership in performance-per-watt,” the blog concludes.
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