I think the stability is the traditional perk of government work (in exchange for a smaller salary). The funding trouble does make it seem like less of a fair trade…
SiFive have apparently been shopping themselves around for a while. But they've been around for a long time, taken loads of investment, had a huge number of employees at one point (not now), and don't have very competitive products. My speculation is they're just not a very attractive acquisition with a complex ownership structure, and are demanding too much money to compensate their earlier investors.
The $2B deal with Intel fell through. Thought they were arguably worth more on paper then. My guess is that they're in a weird place where a fair offer at the moment is less than the investment they've gotten so far.
Note that the $2 billion deal story was always "according to people with knowledge of the matter", and I wonder if it was nothing more than Intel taking a peek at Sifive's technology and books.
Might be worth more than Qualcomm is willing to spend and/or introduce antitrust concerns. This feels like a hedging of bets, no need for Qualcomm to buy the biggest name in the RISC-V space.
SiFive have had a very long time to create competitive CPUs and they haven't really managed it. I dunno what's going on there but I'm not sure I'd buy them either.
Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. Like when Sun Microsystems submitted ODF for standardization to ISO, it was so successful that Microsoft had to do it too for OOXML. In fact MS pushed so hard that it left a huge trail of destruction in the standards committees.
Other times, like with the "ISO power plug", the result was ISO/IEC 60906-1 which nobody uses. Swiss plugs (IEC Type J), which this plug is based on, use a slightly different distance for the ground pin, so it is incompatible. Brazil adopted it (IEC Type N) but made changes to pin diameter and current rating.
Governments seem to care about "self-sufficiency" a lot more these days, especially after what's happening in both China and the US right now.
If the choice is between an architecture owned, patented and managed by a single company domiciled in a foreign country, versus one which is an international standard and has multiple competing vendors, the latter suddenly seems a lot more attractive.
Price and performance don't matter that much. Governments are a lot less price-sensitive than consumers (and even businesses), they're willing to spend money to achieve their goals.
This is exactly what makes this such an interesting development. Standardization is part of the process of the CPU industry becoming a mature industry not dependent on the whims of individual companies. Boring, yes, but also stable.
Yes, and they're both massively debated and criticised, to the point that the industry developed Risk-V in the firstplace. Not to mention the rugpull licensing ARM pulled a few years back.
>On May 5, 1993, Sun Microsystems announced Windows Application Binary Interface (WABI), a product to run Windows software on Unix, and the Public Windows Interface (PWI) initiative, an effort to standardize a subset of the popular 16-bit Windows APIs.
>In February 1994, the PWI Specification Committee sent a draft specification to X/Open—who rejected it in March, after being threatened by Microsoft's assertion of intellectual property rights (IPR) over the Windows APIs
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