The marriage combines Rise's low-power mP6 processor core with a suite of ST peripheral logic. Rise executives said a co-developed product is conservatively targeted for early 2001. The two companies hold rights to second-source products that combine Rise and ST intellectual property.

"Customers told ST they wanted a low-power x86 [core], that it had to be high-performance and at least Pentium class," said David Lin, chairman and CEO of Rise. ST approached Rise after having apparently declined to partner with other companies, according toLin.

Rise's mP6 and ST's STPC are unable to match the clock speed of processors from Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. So Rise ended up late last year following ST into the embedded market for Internet appliances, as it discovered that set-top-box and thin-client OEMs were interested in the mP6's low power consumption.

ST's integrated STPC chip is built around a 486 core designed and licensed to ST by Cyrix Corp. It's likely that the STPC's Cyrix core will be replaced by the mP6, according to Dean McCarron, an analyst at Mercury Research Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz. While the mP6 is too slow for the PC market, its 366-MHz effective performance is significantly better than the100 MHz or so of the STPC.

It's also unclear what effect, if any, Cyrix's acquisition by Via Technologies Inc. last year will have on ST's license. In July 1998, ST announced a partnership with IBM Corp., similar to its agreement with Rise, to design x86 cores for system-on-a-chip applications. That agreement is still in place, according to an IBM Microelectronics spokesman in Fishkill, N.Y.

ST has announced a handful of design wins for the STPC in the embedded-computer sector, and is continuing its design efforts, although clock speeds remain quite low. ST, based in St. Genis-Pouilly, France, has designed three versions of the STPC from the same core -- for the consumer, industrial, and thin-client markets. All integrate a basic 64-bit 2-D controller, PCI and DRAM interface, I/O and interrupt controllers, and serial/parallel-port interfaces.

Two iterations of the STPC consumer chip are heading to market, according to an ST spokeswoman. A 0.35-micron Consumer-S part featuring an SDRAM interface is sampling at 75 MHz -- slower than the 100 MHz expected at launch -- for $34 in 100,000s. The 0.25-micron STPC-Consumer II, with a speed of 133 MHz and above, is slated for the third quarter.