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Marvell is buying Cavium. Both are "fabless" semiconductor manufacturers:
Chipmaker Marvell Technology Group Ltd (MRVL.O) said it would buy smaller rival Cavium Inc (CAVM.O) in a $6 billion deal, as it seeks to expand its wireless connectivity business in a fast consolidating semiconductor industry.
[...] Hamilton, Bermuda-based Marvell makes chips for storage devices while San Jose, California-based Cavium builds network equipment. "With Marvell facing secular challenges on its core chip business, this acquisition is a smart strategic move which puts the company in a stronger competitive position for the coming years," said GBH Insights analyst Daniel Ives.
Marvell, which has been trying to diversify from its storage devices business, had come under pressure from Starboard Value LP last year, when the activist investor called the company undervalued. "This is an exciting combination of two very complementary companies that together equal more than the sum of their parts," Marvell's Chief Executive Matt Murphy said in a statement.
Also at Ars Technica.
Related: HPC Chips Abound
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21 2017, @05:59PM
Broadcom is actually now *MORE* open than Intel/AMD, since you can get documentation on the VC4 core, the firmware isn't signed, and people have successfully initialized almost all the hardware on a Pi2/3 using open source/reverse engineered firmware.
Thanks to probably intentional backdooring, Intel/AMD don't allow that, and even if you could figure out how to write the code, without the signing key, you are screwed.
AMD and Nvidia GPUs have the same problem today as well. Kepler and first Generation Maxwell were the last for Nvidia, and Vega on the AMD side now uses signed firmware as well.