RISC-V champ SiFive confirms it's laying off 1 in 5 workers RISC-V chip designer SiFive has laid off 20 percent of its engineers and other staff amid efforts to refocus on creating bespoke processor cores for customers – though insists everything's fine. The fabless processor outfit said these cuts – hitting about 130 people – is part of a move to re-align its business. This appears to …
Indeed so. Open Source means nothing at all, unless the end user can practicably do something with it. If the end user needs a silicon fab to make use of open source designs it may as well be a widely available keenly priced proprietary design for all the difference it makes.
Open source software is pretty much useless too, other than making it legal to copy it. No end user can practicably do anything with someone else's source code other than maybe build it, which can be prodigiously difficult to set up. So no one really bothers. For example, I bet the source repos for the average Linux distro and rarely troubled...
One must marvel at the audacity of corporations that champion 'dedication' and 'commitment', only to turn around and hand their most devoted a P45, as thanks for the tireless nights and forsaken family moments. The emergence of 'quiet quitting' is hardly surprising. Why, after all, should one bleed for a behemoth that, at the end of the day, might not remember your name, let alone your sacrifices? It’s almost poetic in its irony. Perhaps the enlightened among us have discerned the truth: do just enough to keep the puppeteers appeased, but not enough to erode one's own strings. Because, let's be candid, no corporation will pen an ode to your missed anniversaries or the health you relinquished for their bottom line. Navigate the corporate theatre with wits about you, and never forget where your true allegiances lie.
In smaller startups, perhaps. Sometimes.
But past a certain size, the idea that a corporation can meaningfully discern between "the most dedicated" top performers vs. seat-fillers is pretty laughable.
At that point the big wheels are simply cutting by the numbers, using whatever arbitrary criteria they've decided make sense for that time. Frequently it is about cost (i.e. salary), sometimes it is actually strategic (job function or product affiliation), often as not it is punitive, nepotism, or simply random.
Of course the story they *want* you to believe is being one of "the most dedicated" will somehow save you from the chop. Maybe it will, but that's not the way to bet it. Not even at startups, not when the investment dollars are drying up and the founders see the end of the runway coming up fast.
I'm not sure how this news means RISC-V isn't going to be amazing.
That SiFive have decided to shift their view of where their future lies doesn't affect the future of RISC-V itself. There are other companies out there working on RISC-V, and likely more to come, so there should be plenty of opportunities for those fired and others who have an interest in it.
The message from their founder on Linkedin debunked this article. The reason for the layoff had nothing to do with strategy. The lights need to stay on and 20% of people need to leave.
qualcomm is laying off, imgtec is laying off. Who doing RISC-V is actively hiring? Qualcomm may just be using RISC-V as political leverage and the fact of all these layoffs means sales are unlikely to come soon.
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