SiFive is pulling in nearly $400m in funding this year between a new investment round and the proceeds of a business sale with the ambitious mission of eclipsing rival Arm – and the x86 world of Intel and AMD – with processor designs for everything from smartphones to servers.

The Silicon Valley-based chip designer said Wednesday it had raised a $175m Series F financing round at a more than $2.5bn valuation, only two days after announcing it would sell its OpenFive connectivity business to Alphawave for $210m so that the startup could focus on its RISC-V CPU cores.

SiFive's total funding from investors, which includes SK Hynix as well as the venture arms of Intel, Qualcomm and Western Digital, now stands at more than $350m.

Patrick Little, SiFive's CEO, told The Register that the two cash infusions – with the OpenFive money expected to arrive in late 2022 when the deal closes – serve the same purpose: accelerating its time to market with new designs that best Arm's at performance and efficiency in areas where there is increasingly greater demand for faster computation.

Part of this includes doubling the more than 300 employees in SiFive's core design business over the next 12 to 18 months, according to Little. This does not include the more than 300 people in the OpenFive team who will head to Alphawave later this year.

"It's really down to execution and speed of execution. And so, to me, it's a compute super-cycle where it's really a land grab, and we're moving as quickly as we possibly can," he said.

SiFive was founded in 2015 by the creators of RISC-V, the open-source instruction set architecture. And while the RISC-V ISA is royalty-free to use, SiFive has built a growing business out of it by creating specialty RISC-V-compatible CPU core designs that companies can license to put into system-on-chips.

The way SiFive makes money is essentially identical to the business model of Cambridge, UK-based Arm, whose CPU designs rule the smartphone and embedded computing worlds, and which is now trying to expand to PC, server, and related markets.

But Little said there are a few reasons why SiFive has increasingly come up into comparisons against Arm, which has allowed his biz to amass more than 100 customers, including Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, and several other top semiconductor companies, over the past few years.

For one, Little claimed SiFive customers are reporting the company's high-performance core design that was introduced last year can provide the same grunt as Arm's comparable design at 30 percent less power.

Little is talking specifically about SiFive's P550 core design for automotive applications in this case. However, he said what comes next – the P650 and P670 cores ‒ will soon open opportunities for the chip designer in the PC market. Currently x86 giants Intel and AMD rule the market, whereas Arm has a modest but growing footprint with design partners like Qualcomm.

The plan is to keep introducing more powerful and more efficient core designs so that SiFive eventually eclipses anything Arm or other companies have to offer. Little claimed SiFive will be able to match Arm's designs in any market with an efficiency advantage in the next couple of years.

"We believe that over the coming next two years or so we should be able to say to customers in earnest in any market, 'If you can get it from Arm in terms of the performance level, you can get it from SiFive,' and so that's the intention there," he said. "But we do believe that power efficiency is going to be a persistent advantage that we'll have in any performance."

With the way chip design cycles work and with SiFive's cadence of releasing more powerful designs every nine months or so, Little expects that SiFive customers will be releasing system-on-chips for the PC market in the next three and a half years, which would roughly bring us to late 2025.

Little said he expects commercialization of server processors using SiFive designs to follow shortly after. "It's getting there for client computing, that is the highest hurdle, and then we feel like it would spill over to the datacenter very quickly," he said.

Little also wants SiFive to pounce on the prized market that jolted Arm to the world stage and which Intel sorely lost: smartphones. The CEO knows firsthand how difficult it can be to enter the mobile space. After all, he was previously an executive for several years at Qualcomm, where he led that chip designer's expansion into the automotive space.

But Little said RISC-V is well-suited for mobile, especially because of its low-power capabilities. "We don't see anything in the architecture that would stop us from having profound success in mobile as well," he said.

Outside of Little's performance-per-watt saber-rattling, he believes there are a couple other areas that sets SiFive apart from rivals.

Most crucially, RISC-V is an open standard. That means that if SiFive were to evaporate as a company tomorrow, which we, even as neutral industry observers, would not like to see, companies using chips powered by SiFive technology wouldn't be left completely high and dry, according to Little. Their applications, middleware, and services built for SiFive's RISC-V cores would run on whatever RISC-V-compatible processor they deploy next as a replacement.

"So from one RISC-V vendor to the next RISC-V vendor, there is software compatibility," Little said, contrasting this with Arm, whose ISA is proprietary. "If Arm went away and a company had built a software stack on top of the Arm architecture, there's nowhere to go with that," he said.

There are holders of Arm architectural licenses, such as Apple, that could, we suppose, continue designing their own Arm-compatible CPU cores even if Arm were to vanish. Little's general point was that if Arm were to disappear, system-on-chip designers relying on off-the-shelf Arm cores, and companies with layers of Arm software, could find themselves in a tough spot if not a dead end.

Little said these concerns about Arm and the future availability of its technologies became acute in 2020 when Nvidia announced its intent to acquire the British company, which for multiple Arm customers and regulators raised questions about whether Nvidia would play fair with Arm's licensing model despite the GPU giant offering multiple assurances.

These concerns ultimately sank the Nvidia-Arm deal in February, and Little said it all translated into increased interest in SiFive from organizations once considering Arm designs. This benefited not only SiFive's business for performance core designs, where Arm is the incumbent, but also its design business for artificial-intelligence workloads, according to Little.

"We only launched the product 10 months ago or something like this, and it's already half of our pipeline because we're finding that customers are reticent to get into a situation with a proprietary supplier in a new space," he said of SiFive's Intelligence line of chip blueprints for accelerating AI.

Little sees another advantage for SiFive: the company can be flexible with agreements for licensing and royalty payments for its designs, the latter of which happens when a customer starts selling SiFive-based chips.

"If they say, 'Hey, we're higher volume or lower volume, let's move the business model around a little bit,' we're open to those discussions," Little said.

Among the investors in SiFive's Series F round is Intel Capital, the venture arm of Intel that has previously backed the chip designer. Over the past 12 months, Intel has pledged to manufacture RISC-V chips from its new foundry business and support companies in the RISC-V ecosystem with a $1bn innovation fund, efforts of which include working with SiFive.

Little said he thinks Intel's support of SiFive and the RISC-V ecosystem is "more historically critical or important than everybody gave it credit for," and that it will help his company endure.

Even the Intel juggernaut is behind making it successful

"From that moment on, I can really feel that the world is saying, 'OK, it's going. RISC-V is going. There's no question about it now. It's very obvious. Even the Intel juggernaut is behind making it successful.' So it was really actually very important and a big risk mitigator for us," he said.

Intel apparently had such a great interest in SiFive that it reportedly tried to acquire SiFive for $2bn last year, though the discussions ultimately went nowhere, as Bloomberg reported last October.

Little declined to comment on the report, but he said his goal is to make the company ready for an initial public offering in the next two years.

At the same time, Little said he wants to keep his options open, which could include staying private longer. He also didn't dismiss takeover interest.

"It's a very popular theme inside the company: that we think we're 'IPO-able' in the coming few years," he said.

"Whether or not anyone from the outside tries to work closer or acquire SiFive is anyone's guess. But I think for us, it doesn't matter anyway because we're just heads-down creating the value." ®

Alibaba has announced that Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm will retire from its board on March 31, 2022, after almost seven years as an independent director.

"Alibaba is an incredible company and I continue to believe in its future," Ekholm said in a canned statement, crediting his retirement from the board as part of an effort "to devote more time to Ericsson's business."

It's not hard to see why Ekholm wants to focus on his day job. Top of the list, he must deal with the revelation that Ericsson employees may have indirectly paid off ISIS to get equipment shipped through terrorist roadblocks.

Alibaba Cloud has brought its palm-sized Wuying cloud client device to Singapore – its first foray outside China.

Wuying was revealed in September 2020. The tiny device was suggested as a way for consumers and businesses to break free of PC upgrade cycles. Instead, it allows them to run a virtual desktop streamed from the Alibaba Cloud and endure a cabled connection to a local monitor and input devices.

In 2021 Alibaba offered a sequel: an all-in-one Wuying that offered the cloudy client plus a large touch screen. Accompanying the device was a Cloud Workplace that offers cloud storage and offers admins the chance to manage Wuying devices remotely.

Cybersecurity researchers with Cisco have outlined probable links between the BlackMatter/DarkSide ransomware ring responsible for last year's high-profile raid on the Colonial Pipeline, and an emerging ransomware-as-a-service product dubbed BlackCat.

In a write-up this month, Cisco's Talos threat intelligence unit said a domain name and IP addresses used in a BlackCat infection in December had also been used in a BlackMatter ransomware deployment three months earlier.

In addition, the team outlined tools, file names, and techniques that are common to both the BlackMatter and BlackCat ransomware variants. As a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation, BlackCat can be rented by criminal affiliates to infect and extort targets, with the malware's developers typically getting a cut of the ransom.

Containers may already be your best bet when building and running applications that run in hybrid environments, according to Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner.

Delivering a talk titled "Compute Evolution: Virtual Machines, Containers, Serverless, Which to Use When?" at the Asia-Pacific edition of the firm's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, Chandrasekaran predicted rapid uptake of containers and serverless functions.

Containers, he said, will be used by 90 per cent of global organisations by 2026, up from 40 per cent today. Serverless will go from 25 per cent adoption to 50 per cent in the same period. Both will be used mostly for cloud-native apps, while serverless will be almost exclusively used for new apps because migration is extremely difficult.

Skyhigh Security, formed from the Secure Service Edge (SSE) pieces of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, today announced its name and data-guarding portfolio. 

CEO Gee Rittenhouse, who led McAfee Enterprise Cloud and is a former Cisco security executive, said Skyhigh aims to shift practitioners' focus from granting or blocking network access to resources, to fine-grain monitoring and protection of applications and data even after people have logged in.

Instead of simply securing access to an application, Skyhigh examines what people and machines do with the software, and how they use information with in once their identity has been verified and access granted, Rittenhouse said.

The folks at Deep Instinct say they have studied a Go-written variant of the malware used by the Arid Viper cyber-crime ring.

Deep Instinct, founded in 2015, says it uses deep learning to detect and block malware. While training a deep-learning model that's focused on identifying software nasties written in Go, the researchers uncovered an executable file built using the programming language, submitted it to the VirusTotal website, and found only six security vendors had the binary flagged as malicious.

Further investigation uncovered two similar Go-written binaries. From these programs, we're told, it became clear the team were looking at a variant of Micropsia. This malware was identified in 2017 and is used exclusively by Arid Viper, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group believed to be based in Gaza and known as APT-C-23. Deep Instinct named the Go-written malware Arid Gopher.

A now-former Apple employee accused of causing the iGiant to lose more than $10m in a super-scam has been charged with conspiracy, laundering, and tax evasion.

Dhirendra Prasad, 52, of San Joaquin County, California, worked at Apple in the US from 2008 to 2018, spending most of his time as a procurer of components and services for his employer's products. It's claimed, among other things, he received bribes, put in parts orders for fake repairs, siphoned off components, and caused Apple to pay for stuff it never actually got, all while he profited on the side.

As prosecutors put it this month, Prasad allegedly exploited his position by "engaging in multiple different schemes to defraud Apple, including taking kickbacks, stealing parts, and causing Apple to pay for items and services it never received, resulting in a loss of more than $10,000,000." He allegedly evaded tax on these ill-gotten gains, which he also laundered [PDF] and helped in the evasion of tax.

In brief Tesla reportedly fired an employee after he uploaded videos to YouTube critiquing the automaker's autonomous driving software.

John Bernal, an ex-Tesla operator working on the Autopilot platform, runs a YouTube channel under the username AI Addict. He has filmed and shared several videos demonstrating the capabilities of Tesla's still-in-development Full Self-Driving (FSD) product.

He claims he was axed by management in February after being told that he "broke Tesla policy" and that his YouTube channel was a "conflict of interest," according to CNBC. Bernal insists he never revealed confidential information, and that his reviews were always of FSD versions that had been released to public beta testers.

Google's Messages and Dialer apps for Android devices have been collecting and sending data to Google without specific notice and consent, and without offering the opportunity to opt-out, potentially in violation of Europe's data protection law.

According to a research paper, "What Data Do The Google Dialer and Messages Apps On Android Send to Google?" [PDF], by Trinity College Dublin computer science professor Douglas Leith, Google Messages (for text messaging) and Google Dialer (for phone calls) have been sending data about user communications to the Google Play Services Clearcut logger service and to Google's Firebase Analytics service.

"The data sent by Google Messages includes a hash of the message text, allowing linking of sender and receiver in a message exchange," the paper says. "The data sent by Google Dialer includes the call time and duration, again allowing linking of the two handsets engaged in a phone call. Phone numbers are also sent to Google."

Supermicro’s new "Universal GPU" servers, announced on Monday, is as equal-opportunity as silicon tech can get – it does not discriminate on CPUs, GPUs, storage, and networking technologies.

The boxen can be constructed in a number of ways to include processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics accelerators from AMD and Nvidia. It can be further customized to include proprietary technologies that include Nvidia's NVLink or AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnects to link up multiple GPUs.

The datacenter-class systems, which will come in 4U or 5U sizes, have a “modular” architecture based on standards established by the Open Compute Project, such as the OCP Accelerator Modules (OAM). The modular approach allows for more economical CPU and GPU upgrades without replacing entire systems, Supermicro said.

Updated The Lapsus$ extortion gang briefly alleged over the weekend it had compromised Microsoft.

The devil-may-care cyber-crime ring has previously boasted of breaking into Nvidia, Samsung, Ubisoft, and others. Its modus operandi is to infiltrate a big target's network, exfiltrate sensitive internal data, and then make demands to prevent the public release of this material – and perhaps just release some of it anyway.

"We are aware of the claims and are investigating," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Register on Monday.

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