Wednesday, May 4th 2022
Intel Buys Finnish Graphics IP Developer Siru Innovations
Intel has announced that it has bought 11 year old, veteran Finnish graphics IP developer Siru Innovations. You'd be forgiven if you've never heard about the company, but it has pedigree harking back to the late 1980's and early 1990's, as at least one of its founders was part of the legendary demogroup Future Crew that made some of the most impressive graphics and audio demo software during the BBS era. All three founders were at Bitboys when it was founded in the 1990's and if you haven't heard about Bitboys, you might simply not be old enough. The company was hyped for its Glaze3D graphics architecture that never actually launched, due to the fact that Infineon stopped manufacturing a very specific type of embedded memory that the GPUs were based on.
Bitboys was later acquired by ATI, who in turn of course was taken over by AMD. However, the story doesn't end here, as AMD sold the Imageon business unit to Qualcomm in 2009 and the three founders of Siru moved to Qualcomm for a couple of years, before starting Siru. Since the Intel announcement, the Siru website has been taken down, but the company was working on developing mobile graphics IP, as well as helping other companies develop their own graphics related IP, drivers and so on. As to what Intel is planning on doing with the Siru team isn't entirely clear, but Balaji Kanigicherla, Intel's VP and General Manager, AXG Custom Compute Group Innovating Custom Silicon & Platform Solutions in Blockchain, High Performance Edge Compute and Cloud Computing, Supercomputer, posted on LinkedIn saying that Siru will be joining the AXG Group. You can read the full post below.
Source:
Balaji Kanigicherla @ LinkedIn
Bitboys was later acquired by ATI, who in turn of course was taken over by AMD. However, the story doesn't end here, as AMD sold the Imageon business unit to Qualcomm in 2009 and the three founders of Siru moved to Qualcomm for a couple of years, before starting Siru. Since the Intel announcement, the Siru website has been taken down, but the company was working on developing mobile graphics IP, as well as helping other companies develop their own graphics related IP, drivers and so on. As to what Intel is planning on doing with the Siru team isn't entirely clear, but Balaji Kanigicherla, Intel's VP and General Manager, AXG Custom Compute Group Innovating Custom Silicon & Platform Solutions in Blockchain, High Performance Edge Compute and Cloud Computing, Supercomputer, posted on LinkedIn saying that Siru will be joining the AXG Group. You can read the full post below.
19 Comments on Intel Buys Finnish Graphics IP Developer Siru Innovations
I am sure there are some words missing there, or it's the worlds worst name for a group.
Anyway, whenever I read about Finnish IP innoations I assume it has to do with Bitboys.
Bitboys was fun. Known for vaporware.
They basicly made claims that their 8MB graphics card was able to outbeat both Nvidia, AMD and others like Matrox. Frankly they where never able to release any proper functional graphics card.
Added an and in the end now, not sure if it really helped though.
Nah, their GPUs are great!!!
They probable googled Graphics IP companies and went shopping. Buy now figure out what to do with it later.
Figured most people wouldn't be overly familiar with who the people behind the company was, so it needed a somewhat complex history lesson.
**I'm sure there'll be some who will write this off as the ramblings of an AMD fanboy, but the truth is, that I'd be cheering for any and every company that would find itself in AMD's position, e.g. engaged in two markets in which you're the absolute underdog in both and your competition spends anywhere from 5x to 7.5x the money on R&D as you do, has a historical precedent of engaging in blatantly anti-competitive and anti-consumer practices (e.g. bribing OEMs to not carry your competitors products, GeForce partnership program, etc), and a track record of using those ill-gotten financial gains to undermine the competition rather than beating them in the field of innovation (e.g. Intel buying up all of TSMC's 3nm capacity to keep it out of AMD's hands). I don't cheer for AMD due to the tribalism that motivates the most toxic elements in this community (just spend five minutes in the comments section of an article on WCCFtech and you'll be ashamed that such individuals claim to represent the same community), but unfortunately, at this moment, AMD is our only realistic chance at ensuring we don't return to the pre-Ryzen days of perennial 4-core CPU stagnation and 5% generational "uplifts", or whatever dystopia would be ushered in by a gpu marketplace solely dominated by Nvidia, and I don't perceive a graphics marketplace under the boot of an intel/Nvidia duopoly to be any better, as I wouldn't put it past them to engage in price-fixing or other practices in cartelism. Can anyone else remember the pre-ryzen days? Does anybody else want to return to them? I don't even want to return to the days when an AMD CPU was a consolation prize you settled on strictly for budgetary reasons (e.g. bulldoze/piledriver) and had few, if any, redeeming qualities. I think a lot of people just assume that AMD is here to stay, but the truth is, when you actually look into it, their position is still very precarious and the next few years are going to be extremely important for shaping the next decade with respect to competition, especially if the reports of Intel having bought up all of TSMC's 3nm capacity (despite having their own fabs) and causing Zen5 to either be delayed or forced to an inferior node, turns out to be true. AMD still has not gained nearly enough marketshare in the two most lucrative x86 markets: enterprise and mobile, especially mobile where the vast majority of consumers don't even know AMD exists, conceive of the word "laptop" and intel as interchangeable, and just go to best buy where they wouldn't even conceive of buying an AMD product and the salesperson wouldn't even try to disavow them of that preconception.
That's a match made in heaven.
My guess is they will be given over to driver development to start.