ARM’s been in the news more and more lately. They are after all one of the leaders when it comes to processor instruction sets. Outside of Intel’s x86, we haven’t really seen any real competitor to ARM, at least until now. Sifive is a plucky startup that utilizes the open source RISC-V instruction set for their processors.
While they’ve been slowly growing over the past few years, the Californian company’s latest round of fundraising has been a staggering success. They managed to raise $65.4 million in a Series D round, the company said, bringing its total funding to more than $125 million. What’s most intriguing however is the listing of Qualcomm‘s venture group as an investor.
Qualcomm has long been of the biggest customers for ARM, so seeing them financially back a direct competitor is definitely very interesting. Granted, RISC-V can’t really compete with ARM yet when it comes to mobile phone processors. While RISC-V chips are becoming more prominent, they’re mainly used for IoT devices, smartwatches, network and wearables, and not smartphones and tablets.
Now, whether ARM should be worried about this recent development is another story. While RISC-V doesn’t post a threat to ARM right now, the sheer speed of RISC-V’s development could change this. On top of that, it’s clear that some part of ARM already sees the open-source architecture as a threat, so we can only imagine what they’re thinking now.
We’re eager to see more from SiFive in the future, as well as who else decides to invest in them. As of right now, we’ve got Qualcomm, as well as fellow chip manufacturer Intel and Korean giant Samsung. We expect more companies to push for the open source alternative soon. We could be in for some extremely interesting times in the tech world.
UP NEXT: Xiaomi Mi 9T vs Oppo Reno Z vs Motorola One Vision
(Source)
