In brief: Intel has purchased Indian chip manufacturing startup Ineda Systems for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition has been hailed by the company as an effort to boost their discrete GPU development team, and they will be adding over 100 engineers from Ineda to their staff. Intel has been very vocal about its plans to bring a discrete GPU to market by 2020, recently releasing Linux drivers with support for an unnamed Intel graphics product.
In an effort to boost their quest to develop a discrete GPU, Intel has acquired Ineda Systems for an undisclosed sum.
Based out of Hyderabad, India, Ineda Systems is a startup semiconductor company specializing in fabless SoCs. The company was founded in 2011 and has developed ultra-low-power chips for wearable devices, along with automotive technologies. Ineda has been very successful at raising funds, receiving venture capital investments from major chip manufacturers Samsung and Qualcomm. The founder of Ineda, Dasaradha Gude, previously worked as AMD India's managing director.
Roughly 100 Ineda engineers are expected to join Intel's graphics division. Intel issued the following statement on the matter:
"Intel acquired engineering resources from Ineda Systems, a silicon and platform services provider based in Hyderabad. This transaction provides Intel with an experienced SOC (system on chip) team to help build a world-class discrete GPU business."
Intel has clearly been ramping up development on a discrete GPU, saying in December 2018 that it plans on releasing a product for both gamers and workstation users by the end of 2020. Just this month, Intel released a series of Linux drivers specifically meant for its discrete graphics products.
These drivers, likely created for internal debugging, included 42 patches and 4,000 lines of code to support "upcoming devices with device-local memory." Intel has also launched an Intel Graphics Twitter account with a not-so-subtle header image stating "this is just the beginning."