Together, the four founders of Beaverton startup AheadComputing spent nearly a century at Intel.

They were among Intel’s top chip architects, working years in advance to develop new generations of microprocessors to power the computers of the future.

Now they’re on their own, flying without a net, building a new class of microprocessor on an entirely different architecture from Intel’s. Founded a year ago, AheadComputing is trying to prove there’s a better way to design computer chips.

“AheadComputing is doing the biggest, baddest CPU in the world,” said Debbie Marr, the company’s CEO.

A CPU is a central processing unit, the brain inside a computer. Intel has dominated the CPU market for decades, selling processors based on an architecture the chipmaker owns, called x86.

Today, the computing ecosystem is fragmenting as new standards emerge. That’s one of the reasons Intel is struggling, as computing mainstays like Apple and Google use rival architectures to design their own chips for PCs, smartphones and data centers.

AheadComputing is betting on an open architecture called RISC-V — RISC stands for “reduced instruction set computer.” The idea is to craft a streamlined microprocessor that works more efficiently by doing fewer things, and doing them better than conventional processors.

For AheadComputing’s founders and 80 employees, many of them also Intel alumni, it’s a major break from the kind of work they’ve been doing all their careers. They’ve left a company with more than 100,000 workers to start a business with fewer than 100.

“Every person in this room,” Marr said, looking across a conference table at her colleagues, “we could have stayed at Intel. We could have continued to do very exciting things at Intel.”

They decided they had a better chance at leading a revolution in semiconductor technology at a startup than at a big, established company like Intel. And AheadComputing could be at the forefront of renewal in Oregon’s semiconductor ecosystem.

“We see this opportunity, this light,” Marr said. “We took our chances.”

Big players lose clout

Intel has been operating in Oregon since the 1970s and has long been Oregon’s largest corporate employer. It has more than 20,000 employees in Washington County, including some of the world’s top semiconductor researchers.

Very rarely, though, have any of those thousands of workers left to start their own chip business.

That’s partly because it’s prohibitively expensive for a new company to build a semiconductor factory, and partly because Intel and other tech giants controlled the essential pieces around the CPU. It was hard for newcomers to break in.

Today’s chip startups, however, don’t need their own factories. So-called fabless semiconductor designers like AheadComputing can outsource manufacturing to contractors like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The graphics and AI chip designer Nvidia has become a $3 trillion company — the world’s most valuable business — doing exactly that.

And AheadComputing cofounder Jonathan Pearce says the reign of the chip titans is fading as the systems that run computers break up into a series of “chiplets” from various companies, optimized for specific tasks.

“You get the opportunity for a company like AheadComputing to provide that piece of the overall system,” Pearce said. “As opposed to the past 20 years where it was just one tech giant.”

RISC-V, pronounced “Risk-five,” is especially inviting to startups because it’s an open technology, overseen by a consortium of tech firms. Unlike processors based on x86 or ARM designs, there’s no licensing fee to use RISC-V.

AheadComputing maintains that open standards are the future for microprocessors, giving technology companies more opportunity to customize chip designs to suit their specific needs.

It will be years before AheadComputing’s designs are on the market, but it envisions its chips will someday power PCs, laptops and data centers. Possible clients could include Google, Amazon, Samsung or other large computing companies.

That vision, and the pedigree of the Intel alumni leading the Beaverton startup, has attracted a lot of attention within the industry. AheadComputing raised $22 million in venture capital in February. Prominent semiconductor engineer Jim Keller — a superstar in the rarified field of chip architecture, with stints at Intel, AMD and Apple — turned heads when he joined AheadComputing’s board a month later.

The semiconductor industry is undergoing a transformation as new chips emerge for artificial intelligence and chipmakers test the laws of physics with radical innovations like quantum computing.

“This is where the future is. It’s not about x86. It’s not traditional computer architecture. That’s pretty much a dead field,” said Christof Teuscher, a Portland State University professor who teaches microprocessor design and computer architecture.

AheadComputing is arriving at the right moment, Teuscher said, positioning itself to capitalize on upheaval in the industry — and the ongoing exodus of Intel employees. At this point, though, he said no one can know which new chip architectures will prevail.

Traditionally, Teuscher said RISC-V has been used for embedded systems and academic research. He said he’s skeptical that it can prevail as the industry moves toward high-performance designs for artificial intelligence and supercomputing.

“There’s high risk, but potentially high payoff,” Teuscher said. “And that’s definitely what I would describe their approach.”

Silicon Forest’s new growth

At Intel, AheadComputing’s founders were accustomed to working with cutting-edge manufacturing tools and enormous research labs. Now they’re doing everything themselves — setting up their Wi-Fi network, adding memory to desktop computers and ordering snacks and coffee for the break room.

Alon Mahl left Intel to be AheadComputing’s vice president of design verification, a key role ensuring the company’s chips work as expected. But one of his first tasks was to find and lease an office. He picked a spot on the top floor of The Round development near downtown Beaverton.

“That’s what’s exciting, is that you’re not doing only one thing. You’re doing everything,” Mahl said. “And each one is doing whatever he can to make this company a success. So that’s why I feel energized.”

Intel provided the energy and innovation that fueled several generations of new chip technologies. It spent tens of billions to stay ahead of rivals, growing into Oregon’s largest corporate employer with more than 20,000 workers in Washington County.

The cutting edge became increasingly tenuous, though, as the features on computer chips approached the atomic scale. Intel suffered a series of manufacturing setbacks, the result of bad bets on production technology and an utter failure to break into new sectors, like smartphones and artificial intelligence.

Intel’s stumbles risk destabilizing Oregon’s semiconductor industry, one of the state’s economic pillars. The company shed 3,000 jobs last year, and more layoffs are expected in the coming weeks.

There’s no replacing the outsized impact of Intel’s factories. But new players could help keep Oregon in the game as the semiconductor industry evolves.

Ampere Computing, founded by former Intel President Renée James, sold to Japanese investment bank SoftBank in March for $6.5 billion. It’s retaining its offices in Portland’s Pearl District, where it designs chips used in data centers.

Other Intel alumni have started a handful of other Oregon chip businesses in recent months. AheadComputing says it has already outgrown its offices at The Round and is looking for more space somewhere in Washington County.

Big companies are designed to meet many corporate needs, in the same way conventional CPUs are built to handle all computing workloads. AheadComputing wants to be more like its processors, moving faster because it’s dedicated to specific tasks.

“It’s very hard to disrupt an industry from inside,” said Mark Dechene, who spent 16 years as an Intel CPU architect before co-founding AheadComputing.

At Intel, he said, researchers would consistently underestimate how long a project would take. He said AheadComputing’s engineers guess wrong about the timeframe, too, but now it’s because they’re moving much more quickly than they anticipated.

“With a small, focused team of very capable people,” Dechene said, “you can get stuff done incredibly fast.”