Intel is debating a possible offer to buy SiFive, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, a company closely associated with open source technology that is questioning the rise of Intel’s rival arm.
SiFive, a San Mateo, California-based startup, employs several of the developers of RISC-V, an open source chip technology challenging Arm, the UK chip technology company bought by Nvidia for $ 40 billion Euro). Both Arm and SiFive sell intellectual property such as chip designs to others who ultimately make the chips.
Intel and SiFive declined to comment.
Bloomberg reported on Intel’s interest Thursday, citing a source who said the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker is considering a $ 2 billion (approximately 14,590 crores) offer. Together with competitors like Qualcomm, Intel is already an investor in SiFive, which has raised 61 million US dollars (approx. 450 crores Rs.) In a financing round led by SK Hynix from Korea.
SiFive develops cores using the RISC-V architecture. While the underlying architecture for these cores is open source, the specific core designs themselves can be sold.
By purchasing SiFive, Intel could obtain a library of intellectual property that it could use in its own chips as well as license future customers to build a business by opening its chip factories to outsiders. Intel has already announced that it will license cores to customers based on its own proprietary x86 architecture as part of its contract manufacturing business.
But Intel would also get a software boost. SiFive is also working to simplify programming on different types of computer chips and last year hired Chris Lattner, a well-known computer scientist from Silicon Valley.
Lattner led the development of the Swift programming language for Apple, which developers mainly use to write apps for iPhone models. More recently, Lattner oversaw programming language teams for Alphabet’s Google Brain and TensorFlow artificial intelligence teams.
© Thomson Reuters 2021
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