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Re:Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems by Zigurd on Wednesday December 10, 2025 @12:47PM (#46220874)
There are a lot of little cores in phones doing little core things. Having a first rate design team experienced in an ISA that is royalty free probably makes sense. They'll be able to expand the use of RISCV up the value chain ver time.

Buying a team that's already working on RISCV also reduces the chances of ARM lawyers getting involved.

Re:Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems by panick21_ on Thursday December 11, 2025 @04:35AM (#46229379)
Why would you acquire massive out-of-order super fast CPU team if you wanted a bunch of small cores. There are much cheaper teams and cores you could use for that.
Re:Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems by Zigurd on Thursday December 11, 2025 @12:57PM (#46234690)
Some modems and radios need more than reference-implementation performance and everything in a phone benefits from power efficiency.
Re:Qualcomm acquires RISC-V focused Ventana Micro Systems by panick21_ on Thursday December 11, 2025 @06:09PM (#46238629)
Sure but there are teams that work on radios and modems that likely could be acquired and not sure Qualcomm needs that. RISC-V isn't so different that you need to acquire a team.

Ventana is a company founded and build around a team to do massive ultra wide chips for data-center, and their focus was not efficiency primary. The kinds of chips they build are just not the right fit. Moving all that team over to something on the literal other end of the spectrum and dropping their existing products and costumers seems a bit silly.