Systems

Potential takeover would represent significant commitment to the open instruction set architecture

Qualcomm is reportedly moving to buy AI chip firm Tenstorrent, an acquisition that could prove a major boost to the RISC-V ecosystem.

This comes from The Information, which cites an anonymous source claiming that a deal valued at $8 billion to $10 billion is under discussion.

According to the report, the talks are ongoing and there is no certainty a deal will be reached, but the move would fit with Qualcomm's datacenter ambitions and bullish statements about AI opportunities made by its chief, Cristiano Amon.

The Register asked Qualcomm and Tenstorrent to comment.

Tenstorrent is a Canadian AI chip startup that bases its products on the permissively licensed RISC-V processor architecture. The company is led by CPU guru Jim Keller, known for his design work at AMD, Apple, and on DEC's Alpha chips back in the day.

The firm's Galaxy Blackhole AI compute platform went on sale earlier this year, packing 32 of its Blackhole accelerators, each with 768 RISC-V cores, into a 6U enclosure running its own software stack.

Qualcomm is also keen on RISC-V, especially since its licensing court battle with chip designer Arm, which wanted to nix Qualy's license to create its own Arm-based processor silicon.

The chip design firm's datacenter products use home-brew Hexagon neural processing units, but it continues to rely on Arm processors in its Snapdragon range.

In December, Qualcomm picked up Ventana Micro Systems, another company designing RISC-V CPUs targeting datacenter and enterprise applications. Financial details of that were not disclosed, but estimated at between $200 million and $600 million.

A Tenstorrent buy could therefore see a greater commitment to RISC-V from Qualcomm, giving the open standard a shot in the arm (pun intended) and allowing the chipmaker to further distance itself from Arm and its owner SoftBank as it pursues datacenter customers. Arm appears unfazed by that prospect, having recently said it expects datacenter chips will soon be its main source of revenue. ®