Processor startup Montalvo Systems is reportedly gearing up for a big internal announcement that will go public anytime soon. According to some sources close to the company, the upcoming announcement might spell trouble, despite the company's allegations of having achieved significant progress in CPU research and development.

The chip designer is reported to prepare a massive job slashing as well as other cutbacks to compensate for its loses. The company has recently raised over $73 million in investments, but it started to look for some extra $100 million for research and development. However, the huge amounts of money invested did not pay off until now, which would normally result in slashes.

However, the company might have a surprise up its sleeve to compensate for the bad news. According to some industry reports, the company already finished the design for a new processor silicon, that will be manufactured by Fujitsu's semiconductor unit on the company's behalf. Still, the company did not manage to get sampling units until now.

According to Montalvo, its engineers managed to achieve a new breed of processors that can run the same software as the x86 offerings from its AMD and Intel competitors. However, Montalvo had taken a new approach at the engineering process, and the new processor is built on an asymmetrical architecture on all its four cores.

While two of the chip's cores are more energy-intensive and bigger than the others, the other two are running on less energy and handle low-resource tasks. Through this "miracle" chip, the company wanted to address the problem of energy in both notebooks and handheld devices running on battery.

Despite the fact that the chip's architecture seems strong and promises a lot of achievements if successfully carried to completion, Montalvo has to face tough competition from Intel.

However, Intel has a long experience in tearing its competitors apart, and Transmeta is a clear example. AMD is also on the verge of cracking down on its CPU business, given the fact that it has bled money with its faulty processors.