According to people familiar with the fact, Intel prepares for the acquisition of a chip designer Soft machine company in Santa Clara, SMI (Soft those). It is understood that the deal has been basically finalized, but Intel spokesman and soft and publish any news at the end of the machine. , people familiar with the matter said that since 2006, spent $200 million on the soft money is not particularly good news for investors.

Soft machine has hopes to become a rare company in silicon valley, namely $1 billion start-up company referred to in the industry, but the industry said that soft machine VISC design performance didn't meet expectations, so the value of the company. It is understood that in addition to Intel, there are other companies, including Chinese companies who are interested in and soft joint venture unit.

Soft machine VISC processor architecture is very famous in the industry, VISC is English Variable Instruction Set Computing (Variable Instruction Set Computing). VISC containing multiple physical processor kernel, can be used as the kernel in the software. Two or more physical kernel together can be a virtual central processing unit (CPU).

These virtual kernel through transformation layer performs x86 and 32-bit and 64 - bit ARMv8 code, is the role of transformation layer instructions into similar RISC VISC. Front end of the load balancing physical kernel virtual CPU allocated to implement virtual hardware threads. Allocation is dynamic, and may be changed according to the application to run; If you have any needs, the especially big kernel then gather together in one. Doing so is benefit performance.

Soft machine was launched in 2014, 2014 MHz 8 nm prototype design, at the end of last year was a 16 nm chip test will be sent to chip factory made the samples. Soft machine originally planned on display this year, code-named Mojave 2 GHz 2 w 16 nm FinFET system chip, Mojave with Shasta kernel design has its own style. Mojave containing two virtual kernel, can be mapped to one or two physical cores. System in the future is expected to have more physical CPU chip.

Can be found online to soft machine, chief technology officer and President Mohammad Abdallah conference speech video processor two years ago, he describes the VISC technology in the video.

In addition, the chip giant Intel recently at the moderate scale of acquisition stage, swallow Movidius and Nervana this summer.