Intel in talks to acquire RISC-V firm SiFive for $2B

techradar.com

40 points·elorant··9 comments

> 'Intel in talks to eat smaller company that might otherwise grow to challenge Intel'

There's been a lot of news this past week about Congress finally doing something about megacorps buying smaller companies before they can become challengers. We'll all have to wait and see if Congress actually acts.

But isn't that an important business model for smaller companies?

How would you distinguish between a large corporation bringing an important idea to fruition, and and "buy and bury"?

I mean, what if intel develops risc-v to compete with arm, such as the chips from apple?

Robust competition is very good for everyone.

Intel doesn't need to buy anyone or take any license to start making RISC-V chips that compete with Apple's M1.

And in fact SiFive really can't help Intel with this as SiFive is just in the process of shipping RISC-V chips similar in complexity to Pentium (but at higher clock speed), and is preparing chips similar to Pentium Pro (OoO) or Pentium II (OoO with SIMD)

Intel's culture will prevent any truly impressive internal RISC-V project from gaining any traction. Just look at what has happened with every non-x86 CPU ever made by Intel.

Does this mean Chris Lattner might join Intel’s new chipset mission? :-)

Yay!

He’s a compiler guy, right?

Yes, made LLVM if I'm not mistaken

He was also one of the key designers behind the Swift language at Apple.

I hope this won't ruin RISCV with countless binary blobs. I just got a Kendryte K210 to play with.

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