The article is so bad. Why do they refuse to say anything about what these companies are actually trying to make. RISC-V Chips exist, does the journalist just not know? Does the company refuse to say what they are doing?
The article is written for a different audience than you might be used to. oregonlive is the website for the newspaper The Oregonian, which is the largest newspaper in the state of Oregon. Intel has many of its largest fabs in Oregon and is a big employer there. The local news is writing about a hip new startup for a non-technical audience who know what Intel is and why it's important, but need to be reminded what a CPU actually is.
The fact that California housing pushed Intel to Oregon probably helped lead to its failures. Every time a company relocates to get cost of living (and thus payroll) costs down by relocating to a place with fewer potential employees and fewer competing employers, modernity slams on the breaks.
That might have been true in the early 2000s when they were growing the Hillsborough Oregon campus but most new fabs are opening in Arizona for taxation and political reasons. I don't have the numbers to back it up, but based on articles about Intel layoffs I believe that Intel has been shedding jobs in Oregon for a while now.
I am saying that all this stuff should have never left the bay area, and the bay area should have millions more people than it does today.
Arizona is also a mistake --- a far worse place for high tech than Oregon!. It is a desert real estate ponzi scheme with no top-tier schools, no history of top-tier high-skill intellectual job markets. In general the sun belt (including LA) is the land of stupid.
The electoral college is always winning out over the best economic geography, and it sucks.
It reads like they're trying to drum up investment. This is why the focus is on the pedigree of the founders, since they don't have a product to speak of yet.
