Metaflow Technologies

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Metaflow Technologies was a La Jolla, CA based microprocessor design company. It was founded in 1988 by Val Popescu, Merle Schultz, Gary Gibson, John Spracklen, and Bruce Lightner.

The company is not well known to the general public as none of its designs were ever manufactured in volume. The company is known within the computer architecture community as it published articles in technical journals in the early 1990s that described how an out-of-order with speculative execution CPU might be designed. This was one of the first publicly disclosed OoO designs from a non-academic source.

The Lightning project was a SPARC-based multi-chip processor that was designed according to these principles. The chips were designed and built by LSI Logic, but that support went away before full production could be reached.

The Thunder project was a follow-on that was funded by Hyundai. Hyundai gained control of the company in 1994. This project did not go into production either.

The company was acquired by ST Microelectronics (called SGS Thomson Microelectronics at the time) in 1998. ST Micro originally wanted this design team to work on an Intel IA32 clone, but eventually the team was used for non-personal computer SOCs.

It is rumored that Metaflow collaborated with the Intel team that would eventually design the Pentium Pro, the first commercially available Out-of-Order processor.