Intel Buys Finnish Graphics IP Developer Siru Innovations

Intel has announced that it has bought 11 year old, veteran Finnish graphics IP developer Siru Innovations. You’d be forgiven if you’ve never heard about the company, but it has pedigree harking back to the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, as at least one of its founders was part of the legendary demogroup Future Crew that made some of the most impressive graphics and audio demo software during the BBS era. All three founders were at Bitboys when it was founded in the 1990’s and if you haven’t heard about Bitboys, you might simply not be old enough. The company was hyped for its Glaze3D graphics architecture that never actually launched, due to the fact that Infineon stopped manufacturing a very specific type of embedded memory that the GPUs were based on.

Bitboys was later acquired by ATI, who in turn of course was taken over by AMD. However, the story doesn’t end here, as AMD sold the Imageon business unit to Qualcomm in 2009 and the three founders of Siru moved to Qualcomm for a couple of years, before starting Siru. Since the Intel announcement, the Siru website has been taken down, but the company was working on developing mobile graphics IP, as well as helping other companies develop their own graphics related IP, drivers and so on. As to what Intel is planning on doing with the Siru team isn’t entirely clear, but Balaji Kanigicherla, Intel’s VP and General Manager, AXG Custom Compute Group Innovating Custom Silicon & Platform Solutions in Blockchain, High Performance Edge Compute, Cloud Computing, Supercomputer, posted on LinkedIn saying that Siru will be joining the AXG Group. You can read the full post below.