David Lin, CEO of Rise Technology, confirmed today that his company will produce a Socket 370 chip during the course of this year. At the same time, he revealed that two "multi billion" semiconductor companies were investors in the startup, and that Rise will announce next month who will fabricate its chips. Lin said: "Our investor profile is very interesting and includes bankers, semiconductor companies and VC money. For the sub $1,000 desktop and notebook market our edge is very good with our power consumption and price performance." He said: "You will see Socket 370 versions of our processor this year." He said that the move was related more to marketing its products than giving Rise a technical edge. We predicted Rise would have a Socket 370 chip last December (see reference below). Speculation was mounting at CeBIT that SGS, now known as STMicroelectronics, is likely to be the Rise fab partner. If so, that will give the company a huge boost. Rise was showing its next generation processor, the mp6II on its stand. That will be released in Q2. According to the company, the first iteration of the processor will be at least 300MHz and come with 256K level two cache and an external cache for level three cache. According to Joe Salvador, senior product marketing manager at Rise US, the company will halve the mp6II's power consumption during the course of the year. He said: "For system integrators, low power has a plus with system integrators that were burnt in the past. We'll be very competitive on price with both AMD and Cyrix. The mp6II will allow you to ship off level two cache on sytems." ® Related Stories Those Rise pix from CeBIT 99 Rise to announce Socket 370 breakthrough Rise signs VML as Northern Euro rep