It appears that Intel has been growing its ranks in less than conventional ways of late. Recently, the chipmaker made a purchase of sorts from the Taiwanese company, VIA Technologies, and one of its subsidiaries.
According to multiple reports, Intel supposedly poached several talents from VIA’s x86 subsidiary, Centaur Technology, and paid the parent company a handsome sum of US$125 million. Again, to be clear, Intel’s purchase isn’t inclusive of the subsidiary and is just for several of the individuals that are now part of the chipmaker’s ranks. At the time of writing, though, visitors who head over to Centaur’s official site are greeted with the message that the site is “under construction”, with no further explanation as to when said construction is expected to be completed.
If you’re familiar with Centaur, you’d be forgiven, as the name is not commonplace amongst the average consumer. Intel’s interest in the staff of the VIA subsidiary could be due to the fact that, back in 2019, the company created a new class of x86 servers, capable of taking both Intel’s Skylake and AMD’s 1st generation Zen CPUs head-on.
It is also unclear if Intel had purchased any of the technology the poached staff from Centaur may have created during their tenure there, although that idea seems highly unlikely at this point. In fact, it is possible VIA will simply retain whatever technology designs and patents within its subsidiary.
(Source: Techspot, AnandTech, Tom’s Hardware)
