The company that failed to acquire Lattice Semiconductor will acquire Imagination Technologies instead:
Imagination Technologies Group Plc agreed to be acquired by China-backed private equity firm Canyon Bridge Capital Partners.
Canyon Bridge said it will pay 182 pence a share in cash, or more than 500 million pounds ($675 million), for the U.K. designer of graphics chips. That's 42 percent more than Imagination's closing share price on Friday.
As part of the deal, Imagination will sell its U.S.-based embedded processor unit MIPS to Tallwood MIPS, a company indirectly owned by California-based investment firm Tallwood Venture Capital, Canyon Bridge said.
Canyon Bridge was keen to structure a bid to avoid scrutiny from U.S. regulators, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
Earlier in September President Donald Trump rejected a takeover by Canyon Bridge of U.S. chipmaker Lattice Semiconductor Corp., just the fourth time in a quarter century that a U.S. president has ordered a foreign sale of an American firm stopped for security reasons.
Also at The Verge, AnandTech, and Financial Times.
Previously:
Related:
- Imagination Technologies Group Up for Sale
- Imagination Technologies will Continue to Make GPUs after Losing its Biggest Customer
Related Stories
Imagination Technologies will continue to make GPUs after their biggest customer, Apple, said it would phase out their use of the products. In fact, Imagination will sell its MIPS CPU business and Ensigma communications business and focus solely on GPUs. Meanwhile, Imagination is seeking an agreement with Apple to put the company on better footing:
Just over a month ago, Imagination Technologies dropped the bombshell announcement that their largest customer, Apple, would be phasing out their use of Imagination's GPU IP in their SoC GPU designs. Specifically, Apple expects that they will no longer be using Imagination's IP for new products in 15 to 24 months. This put Imagination in a significant pinch, as Apple is a full half of the company's overall revenue and 69% of their GPU revenue. As a result, Imagination stands to lose the bulk of their GPU revenue starting two years down the line.
[...] Meanwhile in Imagination's bombshell of the month, alongside today's Apple update, the company is also announcing that they are going to be refocusing the company to focus entirely on the GPU business. To that end, the company is putting their remaining non-GPU businesses – the MIPS CPU business and the Ensigma communications business – on the market. Imagination is not listing an expected price for either business at this time – or if they have already lined up any suitors – but the company believes that given the improved fiscal performance of these two divisions, that they are in a good position to sell the two divisions.
MIPS and Ensigma have been two of Imagination's major efforts to diversify the company away from their original core business of GPU IP. MIPS was acquired by Imagination for $100M in 2012 – about 4.5 years ago – while Ensigma has been part of the company since the turn of the millennium. MIPS in particular has been a long-running architecture in the embedded space, and along with x86, is the other alternative CPU architecture supported by Google's Android OS. So the news that the engineering team and product portfolio behind the #2 architecture in mobile and embedded are being sold is a major development. MIPS and Ensigma are now joining Imagination's Pure business, which is also in the process of being sold off.
Imagination Technologies, a company known for its PowerVR GPUs and MIPS processors, saw its shares drop massively when it announced that Apple would make its own GPUs for the next iPhone. Now it is up for sale:
Imagination Technologies Group plc (LSE: IMG, "Imagination", "the Group") announces that over the last few weeks it has received interest from a number of parties for a potential acquisition of the whole Group. The Board of Imagination has therefore decided to initiate a formal sale process for the Group and is engaged in preliminary discussions with potential bidders.
The sale process for the MIPS and Ensigma operations, which commenced on 4 May 2017, is progressing well and indicative proposals have been received for both businesses. [...] There can be no certainty that any offer will be made for Imagination, nor that any transaction will be executed, nor as to terms of any such offer or transaction.
Also at PCMag, AppleInsider (Imagination is an AppleOutsider), and Reuters.
President Trump has blocked Canyon Bridge Capital Partners LLC from acquiring Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, using the authority granted by the Exon–Florio Amendment. Lattice Semiconductor makes programmable logic devices including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs):
President Trump on Wednesday blocked a China-backed investor from buying an American semiconductor maker over national security concerns, a rare move that could signal more aggressive scrutiny of China's deal-making ambitions. The deal for Lattice Semiconductor has provided a test of the president's economic and diplomatic relationship with China.
[...] The White House said on Wednesday that it prevented the acquisition of Lattice Semiconductor, in part because the United States government relies on the company's products. The integrity of the semiconductor industry, it said, was vital.
The White House also raised concerns over the buyer's close ties to Beijing. The investment group included China Venture Capital Fund Corporation, which is owned by state-backed entities, the White House said.
The decision could foretell trouble for other Chinese deals under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency group that examines takeovers of American companies by foreign buyers and makes recommendations to the president. The group, which operates largely in secrecy, is also looking at the proposed purchase of MoneyGram International by Ant Financial, an affiliate of the Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group.
Wave Computing Adopts Low Power MIPS 64-bit Multi-Threaded Core
Wave Computing [...] announced today that it has selected a 64-bit Multi-Threaded processor core from MIPS Technologies for future AI solutions. Wave will use the MIPS core in its next generation of Dataflow Processing Unit (DPU) chips that will ship in Wave's future deep learning systems to handle device control functions including management of the real-time operating system (RTOS) and system-on-chip (SoC) subsystem.
As design complexity and software footprints continue to increase, the 64-bit MIPS architecture is being used in an even broader set of datacenter, connected consumer devices, networking products, and emerging AI applications. In addition to Wave, companies including Mobileye, Fungible, ThinCI, and DENSO, among others, are using the MIPS 64-bit processor core as they develop ground-breaking AI applications. [...] Last August, Denso group company NSITEXE, Inc. announced that it licensed the newest MIPS CPU to drive enhanced in-vehicle electronic processing.
Related: MIPS Strikes Back: 64-bit Warrior I6400 Arrives
PEZY's Next Many-Core Chip Will Include a MIPS 64-Bit CPU
ARM Cortex-A35, Snapdragon 820, and New Imagination MIPS Processors
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched
Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
Submitted via IRC for takyon
Wave Computing today announced that it has acquired MIPS Tech, Inc. (formerly MIPS Technologies), a global leader in RISC processor Intellectual Property (IP) and licensable CPU cores. The acquisition will accelerate Wave's strategy of offering AI acceleration from the Datacenter to the Edge of Cloud by extending the company's products beyond AI systems to now also include AI-enabled embedded solutions.
[...] For example, Datacenter-centric AI applications today need many weeks to train using coprocessors such as GPUs, only to require a different architecture for inferencing at the Edge. The lack of a common AI platform, from Datacenter to Edge, slows market growth and reduces productivity of data scientists in fields such as autonomously driven vehicles, IoT sensors and more.
[...] "Wave's integration of two industry-leading compute architectures in a single data plane/control plane solution – Dataflow and Von Neumann – will be truly unique and an industry-first. It will fuel new, ground-breaking innovations in AI and other fields."
Source: Wave Computing Acquires MIPS Technologies
Related: Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
Wave Computing and Others Adopt 64-Bit MIPS Cores
Imagination Technologies to design RISC-V cores:
Now better known for its PowerVR embedded GPUs, Imagination Technologies tried to enter the CPU market by purchasing MIPS Technologies and introducing microAptiv, interAptiv, and proAptiv cores in 2012.
It did not end up well, as the company had to sell its MIPS technology a few years later, and the MIPS architecture is now barely supported. But Imagination is now working on getting back into the CPU space by designing RISC-V cores.
[...] a May 2021 report by the Financial Times claims Imagination expects to invest up to $150m over the next two years to target a fresh push into the processor design market, specifically citing the RISC-V architecture.
Also at Tom's Hardware.
See also: QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes
Related: Imagination Technologies Acquired for $675 Million, MIPS to be Sold Off
Wave Computing Acquires MIPS Technologies
Imagination Announces B-Series GPU IP: Scaling up with Multi-GPU
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday September 25 2017, @09:53PM (1 child)
... without hurting anyone.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday September 26 2017, @08:45AM
I, too, was impressed, MDC! If only we had more Fine Articles like this, and fewer, or no, aristarchus submissions. (before you mod, see sig.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday September 26 2017, @09:27AM (6 children)
ImagTec tried to compete with ARM in the mobile market. They managed to get less than 1% of the Android market for a huge investment in toolchain, OS, and so on. This cost them a lot for no return and in their last annual statement to shareholders, they admitted that it was a terrible idea and they were giving up. They decided to refocus on the low end embedded market, but there they're squeezed between RISC-V and ARM. The RISC-V ecosystem isn't very strong, but neither is MIPS anymore: OS support is poorly maintained, LLVM support is only just there. GCC support ahas always been a bit flakey because every MIPS vendor forked GCC, added their own incompatible extensions, broke everyone else's, and never upstreamed them. RISC-V is in a similar state but, unlike MIPS, a load of companies are investing in improving the ecosystem. No one really cares about MIPS and the big MIPS vendors like Cavium have moved on to ARMv8. RISC-V cores are going to be a lot cheaper than MIPS at the low end. If you are willing to pay more for a mature and well-supported ecosystem and very low power chip designs, ARM will sell you M-profile cores and a load of good development tools.
At this point MIPS is basically dead, so who thought it was worth $65m? Normally, this kind of acquisition would be from someone who intended to become a patent troll, but before ImagTec bought MIPS a consortium including ARM bought all of the MIPS patents precisely to avoid this kind of thing.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @10:09AM (5 children)
About four years ago I remember strange things being afoot. About then I started to look for a new job and I got a few calls from recruiters telling me about this wonderful opportunity at Imagination Technologies who were buying MIPS and going to take on ARM. I tried very politely to explain why it wasn't a great idea. Now if only I could do the same for the lottery numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Tuesday September 26 2017, @11:14AM (4 children)
ImagTec really bungled MIPS. They failed to understand the value of a healthy ecosystem. Most MIPS products in the wild are based on R7K-derrived things - MIPS IV ISA. There are a huge number of these in routers and things, but MIPS IV is now over 20 years old and so out of patent (therefore you don't need a MIPS license, just a license for the IP core, which ImagTec didn't own). ImagTec therefore completely ignored this part of the ecosystem (for example, LLVM support for MIPS IV and III completely sucked until I and a couple of colleagues started upstreaming some of our patches) in favour of MIPS32 and MIPS64 things that were still (possibly) in patent. Because of this, they never managed to convince their natural partners that they had a good migration path from the old and cheap MIPS cores to newer ones.
At the same time, they pushed out MIPSr6, which recycled a bunch of 'deprecated' opcodes for newer instructions. MIPSr6 is actually a pretty reasonable ISA, but unfortunately those 'deprecated' instructions were still generated by GCC (and other compilers) and so there was no way of running old MIPS binaries on new MIPS cores without a hypothetical binary rewriting program that ImagTec never released (and which wouldn't have worked for JITs). You couldn't even do the trap-and-emulate dance, because they reused the opcodes. This basically meant that there was no incremental migration path from MIPS IV to MIPSr6, and if you're going to go to what is effectively a new ISA then you may as well go to ARM (where, at least, you buy into a large and thriving ecosystem for your entrance fee).
To make matters even worse, they didn't release any MIPS64r6 cores and focused entirely on MIPS32r6. There are basically two kinds of customer who buy 32-bit cores now: those for whom price is the primary concern and those for whom power is the primary concern. For the latter, the ImagTec parts couldn't compete with ARM M-profile. For the former, the ImagTec parts couldn't compete with MIPS R7k or ARM7 / ARM11 cores (old, and with a bunch of companies that licensed them for a lot of money for an unlimited-copy license that is now completely paid off, so they cost a few percent above the cost of fabrication).
And, just as they were being squeezed here, RISC-V came along and companies like Micron who use ARM cores in places where they really don't care about the ISA (because it's not public, such as on SSD controllers), don't care much about power consumption (because the core is a tiny proportion of overall power consumption), and really just need a working C compiler started looking at migrating, as did a bunch of companies like nVidia that used an in-house ISA and didn't want to be the only ones maintaining a toolchain.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:24PM (3 children)
Yes, it's amazing in this day and age how many businesses people still don't understand Imaginary Property. It's pretty clear that unless you're one of the major x86 people or ARM you're going to have a very hard job competing unless you have something very special to offer.
The other thing is that Free/Open Source hasn't caught on with many of the hardware people yet in the same way it has with software. I'm a software enthusiast and know very little about hardware (wish I had the time and the brains) but if I did, I'd play with the stuff on opencores.org.
I have a feeling that ARM is going to slowly be overtaken by RISC-V in the way that traditional Unix was by Linux and friends.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday September 26 2017, @01:57PM (2 children)
This might happen, but RISC-V has a delicate balance to strike. The thing that killed MIPS (before ImagTec bought it) was ecosystem fragmentation. ARM has been very careful to reduce the number of incompatible versions. You now basically can't make incompatible ARM cores, even if you have an architecture license, you have to differentiate by other cores on your SoC and by different pipeline designs. In contrast, MIPS let anyone add specialised instructions in the coprocessor space (ARM did early on, but stopped quite a while ago). This meant that every MIPS vendor would fork GCC to add support for their custom instructions and no one upstreamed their forks because they broke everyone else's. Everyone hacked up Linux or FreeBSD to handle their extra register sets and other processor state, often not upstreaming their changes for similar reasons. Running software for vendor X MIPS on vendor Y MIPS involved a significant porting effort.
RISC-V faces a similar fate: everyone is implementing the base specification plus a subset of the standard extensions and soon they're going to start adding non-standard extensions too. This is great for some of the vendors who want something very custom, but it's bad for the ecosystem as a whole. It's difficult to do this in an open source model, because the strength of open source is the lack of a central authority preventing people from doing what they want with the project.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 26 2017, @02:14PM (1 child)
Would it be possible to implement the base specification plus have some run-time configurable (microcode, FPGA...?) parts to be able to emulate any extensions as required? What about the Transmeta approach? But then you might as well choose a more common instruction set to translate.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 27 2017, @10:03AM
Obviously, it's possible (from the Church-Turing Thesis), but if compilers are emitting an instruction because it's fast and on your implementation it goes from being a single-cycle instruction to one that takes 200 cycles then that's not so great. FPGAs don't tend to use the same fabrication techniques as ASICs and don't run at the same clock speed, so that wouldn't be so great. You can always trap-and-emulate instructions, though this gets messy if you have two shared libraries that both want the different extensions. The hardest things to emulate are things like the A extension (emulating atomicity is insanely hard) and things like lowRISC's tagged memory extensions (which add extra semantics to all load and store instructions).
sudo mod me up