SiFive have apparently been shopping themselves around for a while. But they've been around for a long time, taken loads of investment, had a huge number of employees at one point (not now), and don't have very competitive products. My speculation is they're just not a very attractive acquisition with a complex ownership structure, and are demanding too much money to compensate their earlier investors.
Does anyone know or have they leaked potential cost of acquisition?
The $2B deal with Intel fell through. Thought they were arguably worth more on paper then. My guess is that they're in a weird place where a fair offer at the moment is less than the investment they've gotten so far.
Note that the $2 billion deal story was always "according to people with knowledge of the matter", and I wonder if it was nothing more than Intel taking a peek at Sifive's technology and books.
Might be worth more than Qualcomm is willing to spend and/or introduce antitrust concerns. This feels like a hedging of bets, no need for Qualcomm to buy the biggest name in the RISC-V space.
SiFive have had a very long time to create competitive CPUs and they haven't really managed it. I dunno what's going on there but I'm not sure I'd buy them either.
Their P870-D looks plenty competitive.
What they might have issues with is finding clients to license it to.