Chip design is a RISC-y business: Codasip puts itself up for sale

European RISC-V biz Codasip has put itself up for sale, citing an expression of interest during a recent funding round, and is now openly touting for buyers. The Munich-based developer of RISC-V chips and electronic design tools said it has officially kicked off the process today, July 1, and expects it to be complete within …

[HuBo]

Sensible move

Yeah, I don't quite see RISC-V as a competitive replacement for beefy workhorse CPUs in anything from smartphones to datacenters, but rather as a new version of the Transputer that can meet its original goal of making "CPUs so small and cheap that they could be combined with other logic in one device", particularly suited for dataflow-amenable and parallelizable workloads (with reconfigurable networking).

I think that's what Esperanto, SiFive, Tenstorrent, and others (eg. Untether ...) have been (rightly) shooting for with this arch.

There's a lot of competition and a risk of fragmentation in this space imho, and so if Codasip is currently in a solid position that allows it to sell itself at a profit, then why not do it (rather than wait for some other outfit to steal its thunder). The part of it that is funded by DARE has to stay in the EU anyways, so the Codasip sale may end up coalescing EU development efforts under fewer more capable units rather than many smaller ones that compete against each other for attention and funds.

Eventually, it's the international competition that has to be considered (with US, China, Japan, UK ...) and for that, joining forces within the EU may be best indeed, imho! (if that's what ends up happening)

[pimppetgaeghsr]

Codasip up for sale, Imagination up for sale. Many others in limbo.

Sounds like it's a buyers market as Private Equity now looks to cash in its profits after years of running on fumes and gross cuts over the past 3 years only to find they have added absolutely no value to the fundamental business. Notice all these companies have a completely out of touch generation at the top looking to also enter a comfy retirement.

The dildo of consequences doesn't seem to be arriving lubed.

[juice]

Show me the money

I can't help but think that RISC-V is showing the fundamental difference between open-source software, and open-source hardware.

Open-source software is easy to change after launch. Creating copies of code costs nothing, and once you have a copy, you can tweak, upgrade and change to your heart's content.

Conversely, open-source hardware is not easy to change after launch. After all, you've got to tape out the design, send it off for prototyping, and then commit to a production order which is large enough to be cost effective.

And if there's any functional issues found in the hardware after launch, then (unless it's something you can work around in software) you'll have to scrap/recall all of that hardware and start again.

It's just too big a risk. Far better to go for a tried and tested design, even if the per-unit production costs are a bit higher.

And that's where these companies are struggling.

RISC-V works well in "low end" scenarios, where people just need a cheap, mass-produced, low-power and entirely vanilla CPU. E.g. in the "Baby Shark" themed handwash bottle someone bought me for my birthday, which sings "Wash your hands, do do do" every time you press the button[*].

But if you're wanting something higher powered, then RISC-V is still way behind ARM on the performance front. And paying for a bespoke design with added bling both reduces the cost advantage and increases the production risks.

[*] Gee, thanks, guys.