In order to block the development of my country's semiconductor industry, foreign countries are withdrawing the technology and equipment rights that were previously authorized to domestic manufacturers for use bit by bit. The experience of Huawei , Feiteng , and SMIC also proves the importance of core technologies. As of now, domestic semiconductor manufacturers still face many difficulties. For example, VIA sold part of X86 business to Intel .
November 5, 2021, VIA VIA issued an announcement: The company has sold part of its X86 processor R&D subsidiary Centaur Technology to Intel for US$125 million (converted to approximately RMB 800 million). In addition, VIA did not disclose any more details, and Intel, as the acquirer, did not mention the deal.
However, according to foreign reports, VIA did not sell all its Centaur, but retained part of its business. As for which part of the business has been retained, how many employees have been left, and whether the core R&D engineers are still there, the outside world does not know. What is easy to make people think that after VIA sold some of its business, Centaur's official website has been offline and the official website shows that it is being rebuilt.
Maybe some friends don’t know much about VIA VIA, so I will briefly introduce it here. VIA is the only X86 processor manufacturer left after Intel and AMD. Its X86 business comes from Centaur, which VIA acquired in 1999. However, compared with Intel, VIA has almost no presence in the chip architecture market, with a maximum share of no more than 0.1%.
VIA's latest achievement is the CNS X86 core server launched by Centaur in 2019. The conventional performance of this processor chip is fairly good. However, Centaur originally planned to release the product codename "CHA" for the CNS X86 core server in the second half of 2020, and has not been reported yet. For VIA, Centaur is like a "small rib" and it is not surprising that it will sell some of its businesses.
But for VIA's customers, some of Centaur's business being sold will also be indirectly affected. It is understood that some of the technology of chip design companies such as Zhaoxin and Jingjiawei in my country come from Centaur, a subsidiary of VIA. This time, VIA's VIA sold part of Centaur's business, which means that the X86 architecture used by Zhaoxin and Jingjiawei will be restricted to a certain extent by Intel.
but it is not certain, after all, Centaur still retains part of the business. As for some of the retained business packages do not include domestic semiconductor manufacturers such as Zhaoxin and Jingjiawei, we still don’t know. But there is no need to worry too much. Domestic chip manufacturers such as Zhaoxin and Jingjiawei have only used some of the technical services of VIA. After all, Centaur, a subsidiary of VIA, is not high in the chip architecture market.
But this also reveals a problem from the side, namely core technology. Here is a supplement to the importance of chip architecture. Architectural instruction sets are the cornerstone of logic chips and are crucial to chip design manufacturers. Its position in the field of logic chips is equivalent to the lithography machine in the field of chip foundry and the vacuum evaporation machine in the field of OLED panels. Domestic chip manufacturers are highly dependent on foreign technology in chip architecture. The mainstream architectures of Arm, X86, and RISC-V are all from abroad.
In fact, there are many mergers and acquisitions and acquisitions related to chip architecture. For domestic chip manufacturers, every acquisition has to be worried. For example, Nvidia's acquisition of Arm, Intel's acquisition of RISC-V, etc. Although the acquisitions of Nvidia and Intel ended in failure, it was really hard to worry about all day long. Therefore, it is crucial for us to have a mature, stable, autonomous and controllable instruction set architecture.
Fortunately, my country's Loongson Zhongke realized this and launched a set of independent and controllable instruction set architecture "loong Arch". At present, "loong Arch" is in the stage of ecological construction. Loongson 3A5000 equipped with the "loong Arch" instruction set is currently used. I look forward to loong Arch to perform more and better in the future.
VIA sold part of Centaur's X86 business to Intel. What do you want to say about this? Do you think some of Centaur's business has a great impact on domestic chip manufacturers such as Zhaoxin and Jingjiawei?
Welcome to leave messages and comments below. I am Berbert Technology, a senior semiconductor technology enthusiast. Follow me to learn more about the latest semiconductor information and learn more useful semiconductor knowledge.
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