adapteva

Synopsys has a $100B market cap. Why would Alphabet buy them and open source the IP? That makes no economic sense.

The open source tools are great, I use them every day...however, they are light years away from being feature complete for doing a complex products (synthesis qor, multi clock cts, timing driven placement, upf support, statistical timing, too many features to count)...it's death by a thousand paper cuts. Once all those features have been implemented, the next barrier is to get first class status with foundries who ship the EDA development. Currently most only ship enablement for synopsys and cadedence.

Does anyone have the backstory on this?

Thank you, comment made my day:-)

Yeah, this was a big dilemman You can't compare two different compilers for two different hw targets. That would be like benchmarking GCC compiling to ARM with LLVM compiling to x86.

Thierry's synthesis scripts are really very clever, and the go way beyond our Platypus FPGA arch. We are realistic that until we have seilicon nobody cares about our arch. Releasing the work as open source, we think someone should adapt the code for all of the other targes I Yosys (xilinx, lattice...etc) so that everyone can benefit.

We contribute a lot of code to open source, but as an FPGA vendor we are not going to spend time/money optimizing compilers for our competitors:-)

No strings common share purchase means cash in hand, which implies Intel can spend it on any operational cost, including buying billions in TSMC wafers (which they already do).

Any strings attached? If not, ironically a big chunk of those US tax payer dollars will likely end up in Taiwan/TSMC.