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Chipmaker SiFive Is Said to Draw Intel Takeover Interest
- johndoe0815 5y agoThat would be even more horrible than the Arm takeover by NVidia. SiFive is probably the most important designer of RISC-V IP at the moment and I would be really unhappy to see Intel becoming involved (mostly to get rid of an annoying small competitor, I would expect). I'm still peeved that Intel has killed the Alpha and StrongARM (both originally designed by DEC)...
- Dracophoenix 5y agoCompaq killed Alpha and StrongARM, Intel just bought & buried the bodies.
- fvv 5y agoWiki says strongarm was sold to Intel in 1997
- ksec 5y agoNot sure why Intel is buying SiFive. And I dont understand why Nvidia wants to buy ARM either. Normally for 99% of other companies doing M&A I dont understand, the probability of CEO having self interest on their CV or dump strategy thinking are to blame. But this is Jensen Huang and Pat Gelsinger. Which means I must be missing something.
- Dracophoenix 5y agoIntel wants to survive the likely implosion of x86 in the consumer and, eventually, enterprise spaces. Nvidia wants to define the standard for, inter alia, the next few generations of CPUs and GPUs without needing Chipzilla-sized manufacturing expenditures (and the strings the come attached) or being held hostage by licensing costs. In both cases, the motive is survival and the expansion of their respective playbooks.
- gautamcgoel 5y agoNot surprising at all. Everyone knows x86's days are numbered - at a certain point, there's not many microarchitectural more optimizations you can do, given all the cruft associated to the ISA, and you really need to reach for a cleaner design to improve performance. This is partially why Apple and Amazon switched to ARM. Intel knows this, so they don't have much choice to begin exploring alternative ISAs. SiFive is a leader in the RISC-V space, and so is the obvious choice for an aquihire.
- phkahler 5y agoIntel likes cruft. They keep adding extensions (sometimes stupid) to keep adding value for niche applications. That also forces AMD to try to keep up. RISC V is extensible and Intel would undoubtedly patent some extensions of their own, trying embrace/extend/patent on an otherwise open standard. Still might be cool as the base ISA is solid and the existing vector option is already superior. I'd love to see what Intel or AMD teams could do with it.
- marcodiego 5y agoHope we'll still have IME-free Risc-V for some years.