Qualcomm Acquires RISC-V Chip Designer Ventana To Boost CPU Efforts

The chip design giant says Ventana’s expertise in RISC-V, a free and open alternative to the Arm and x86 instruction set architectures, will enhance its CPU engineering capabilities and complement ‘existing efforts to develop custom Oryon CPU technology.’

Qualcomm said Wednesday that it has acquired Ventana Micro Systems, a startup that was focused on developing server CPU technology based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture.

The San Diego-based company said Ventana’s expertise in RISC-V, a free and open alternative to the Arm and x86 instruction set architectures, will enhance its CPU engineering capabilities and complement “existing efforts to develop custom Oryon CPU technology.”

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Oryon is at the center of Qualcomm’s push to gain footholds in the PC and server markets—and grow in other areas—as part of ongoing efforts to diversify its business beyond mobile chipsets. The company gained the custom, Arm-compatible CPU core architecture through its $1.4 billion acquisition of startup Nuvia in 2021.

After the chip designer debuted Oryon in its Snapdragon X Series processors in a revitalized push in the PC market last year, the company announced in May that it plans to make another attempt at designing and selling server CPUs. These efforts have been boosted this year by its hiring of a former Intel Xeon chief architect and its $2.4 billion deal to acquire Alphawave Semi.

Qualcomm, which has already been using RISC-V for some products outside the PC and server markets, said Ventana’s contributions will boost its “technology leadership in the AI era across all businesses,” indicating the broad impact expected by this acquisition.

“We believe the RISC-V instruction set architecture has the potential to advance the frontier on CPU technology, enabling innovation across products,” Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager of technology planning, edge solutions and data center for Qualcomm, said in a statement. “The acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems marks a pivotal step in our journey to deliver industry-leading RISC-V-based CPU technology across products.”

Balaji Baktha, founder and CEO of Ventana, said in a statement that his company is “thrilled to join the Qualcomm team and contribute our RISC-V expertise in the development of Qualcomm’s leading Oryon CPU technology.”

Founded in 2018 and based in Cupertino, Calif., Ventana developed RISC-V CPU technology that provided “performance competitive with the latest Arm and x86 data center CPUs,” according to its website. This technology was made available in multi-core chiplets or core intellectual property that could be integrated into chip designs by other companies.

The startup targeted several markets and applications, including cloud, enterprise data center, hyperscale, 5G, edge compute, AI and machine learning as well as automotive.

Back in January, Ventana said that it expected to start shipping this year its Veyron V2 platform for data centers focused on “AI and domain-specific computing.” This platform included a high-performance RISC-V CPU as well as a high-performance vector unit and integrated matrix math acceleration for “AI workloads and other compute-intensive applications.”

The company also boasted of the platform’s “modular design,” which allowed customers to “integrate domain-specific acceleration such as AI” into Veyron V2. It also said that the platform could enable up to 75 percent cost savings and accelerate “time-to-market by up to two years for solutions integrating domain-specific acceleration.”

At the time, Baktha said that Veyron V2 was “embraced by leading hyperscalers and [high-performance computing] customers.”

The Ventana acquisition was announced after Qualcomm in September claimed “complete victory” in a legal dispute with Arm, which sought a halt to sales and the destruction of all Qualcomm chips containing the Oryon cores because of alleged breaches of Arm’s architecture licenses by Qualcomm and Nuvia.

A U.S. district court judge in Delaware dismissed a remaining claim in Arm’s lawsuit against Qualcomm and Nuvia that alleged a breach in the licensing agreement held by the latter company. A federal jury sided with Qualcomm over Arm last December on the two other claims related to Oryon’s development in the lawsuit

The lawsuit, which was filed in 2022, could have threatened Qualcomm’s ability to develop products using Arm’s instruction set architecture.

Arm has vowed to appeal the judge’s final ruling.