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VIA To Offload Parts of x86 Subsidiary Centaur to Intel For $125 Million
As part of their third quarter earnings release, VIA Technologies has announced this morning that the company is entering into an unusual agreement with Intel to offload parts of VIA's x86 R&D subsidiary, Centaur Technology. Under the terms of the murky deal, Intel will be paying Centaur $125 million to pick up part of the engineering staff – or, as the announcement from VIA more peculiarly puts it "recruit some of Centaur's employees to join Intel," Despite the hefty 9-digit price tag, the deal makes no mention of Centaur's business, designs, or patents, nor has an expected closing date been announced.
A subsidiary of VIA since 1999, the Austin-based Centaur is responsible for developing x86 core designs for other parts of VIA, as well as developing their own ancillary IP such as deep learning accelerators. Via Centaur, VIA Technologies is the largely aloof third member of the x86 triumvirate, joining Intel and AMD as the three x86 license holders. Centaur's designs have never seen widescale adoption to the extent that AMD or Intel's have, but the company has remained a presence in the x86 market since the 90s, spending the vast majority of that time under VIA.
Centaur's most recent development was the CNS x86 core, which the company announced in late 2019. Aimed at server-class workloads, the processor design is said to offer Haswell-like general CPU performance, which is combined with AVX-512 support (executed over 2 rounds via a 256-bit SIMD). CNS, in turn, would be combined into a product Centaur called CHA, which added fabric and I/O, as well as an integrated proprietary deep learning accelerator. The first silicon based on CHA was originally expected in the second half of 2020, but at this point we haven't heard anything (though that's not unusual for VIA).
VIA on Wikipedia.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @08:10PM (2 children)
If so wouldn't it be cheaper to poach the engineers directly with the money?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @11:21PM
While acquihire is a thing, Richtopia's comment is probably correct that it is a move to try to get x86 IP out of China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 05 2021, @11:22PM
Not for something like this. Engineers would have non-competes. On top of that the IP they generate would have to be cleared. Plus, the processes, raw documentation, and institutional knowledge are often more important than the actual people who wrote them. There are other considerations that also weigh in. Altogether, it is often cheaper and faster to acquihire than to steal talent directly.