Although Intel is still the main semiconductor manufacturer in the world ahead of Samsung and TSMC, its competition is tightening and on the other hand in terms of purely theoretical technology, it has NVIDIA with ARM and AMD. For this reason, and apparently, those in Santa Clara have made a signature offer to buy SiFive for a value that is 300% more than last year’s investment capital. What is going on behind the scenes?
Intel offers $ 2 billion to buy SiFive
For those who do not know this company, we are talking about a semiconductor manufacturer without a real wafer factory, so it is indeed a designer of commercial silicon and IP solutions based on RISC-V processors.
If we stick to the facts, the two companies have collaborated in the past and developed common platforms, so they know each other, to the point that in 2018 Intel funded SiFive in its round of financing open to investors. That Intel wants to buy out this company for business or technological purposes is understandable, especially to enter with more force to bet on RISC-V, which we will talk about later.
The problem is that SiFive, it seems, is valued by $ 500 million basically so why is intel offering so much more money? A question that perhaps has to do with the latest movements of the company in terms of production and competition.
Intel could enter the RISC-V market with different IPs to compete with ARM and NVIDIA
Rumors are skyrocketing so take a little salt and let’s go, as theories suggest that the blue giant would allocate resources for building different IPs based solely on RISC-V due to its ability to cut costs through its ISAs are layered, stretchy and flexible in design.
With those IPs, it could come in to compete with ARM, dismantling the NVIDIA coup and defeating AMD (assuming the products launched covered the market well and sold well).
The other theory is that by expanding their Fabs to produce newer, larger manufacturing nodes, opening up their designs to third parties and expanding their services as a foundry, having RISC-V IPs to create on-site would be attractive to many businesses that require high and low performance SoCs for specific tasks.
In any case, you are not even sure that the purchase is on the table, at the moment it is a rumor, but when the river rings … the water washes away.
