Intel’s Latest Acquisition Is Siru Innovations

Remember BitBoys And The Case Of The Non-existent Glaze3D GPU?

Us old folks likely have vague memories of a family of vapourware GPUs called Glaze3D 1200, Glaze3D 2400 and Glaze3D 4800 which promised the moon and delivered nothing.  In 1999, a card that could offer such things as support for DirectX 7, OpenGL 1.2, AGP 4×, 4× anisotropic filtering, and full-screen anti-aliasing was a dream come true; unfortunately it remained a dream and BitBoys Oy ended up with a bad reputation.  

They had previously released other products successfully, which is why ATI was interested enough in them to purchase them in 2006.  When ATI folded up into AMD, the BitBoys team once again moved, this time to to Qualcomm after AMD sold their Imageon IP to that company.  Over time, some of those employees left to start their own company, Siru Innovations, which developed software and silicon building blocks for GPUs which they licensed to companies which could use them in their own GPUs.

Their story does not end there however, as today we found out that Siru Innovations was just bought by Intel and rolled into Raja’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group.  According to the information from The Register, Intel plans to leverage their experience to design such features as mobility-as-a-Service, advanced driver assistance systems, gaming, and hyperscale datacenters.

Read more about the history of the company and the plans Intel seems to have for them here.