INTERESTING -
INTEL and QUALCOMM BOTH have their fingers in the latest SiFive pie .............................coincidence?
Fans of this newsletter know I’m a major chip nerd. I started my tech career as a semiconductor reporter, and for the last seven or eight years I’ve been closely watching RISC-V, an open source chip architecture. The RISC-V architecture, which was developed a decade ago at UC Berkeley, competes...
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Already companies such as Nvidia, Western Digital, Samsung, and Alibaba have been building silicon based on RISC-V for their own internal use. But in the wake of Nvidia’s failed takeover of Arm, a lot of companies took a look at RISC-V and began developing their own strategies around this instruction set, making it a soon-to-be competitor to Arm and Intel. However, it’s not quite ready to take the IoT world by storm just yet.
In mid-month, SiFive, a company that builds RISC-V cores and licenses them out to other businesses that don’t want to tackle that much chip engineering, raised a fifth round of funding that valued it at $2.5 billion.
Even more interesting were the companies that were involved in the funding, which included the venture capital divisions of both Intel and Qualcomm.
Intel, long a jealous defender of its x86 architecture as the best and only option for computing, has softened its stance as it has lost ground to Nvidia on the AI side and Arm in mobile and IoT. Now, as it seeks to regain relevance, Intel is embracing the manufacturing of others’ chips and other architectures.