Intel Acquires Silicon Hive In Push For Mobile Processing Chips

Editor's note: this article was originally published March 17, 2011.

Intel acquired Silicon Hive today in an effort to push itself further into the mobile device market. Silicon Hive is a company specializing in making chipsets for smartphones, media hubs and other small devices. Intel has been lagging behind in mobile processing, and although its Intel Atom is gearing up for tablet devices, their processor is still too big, demands too much power, and is more expensive than those of competing chip makers such as ARM and NVIDIA.

"We now target phenomenal successes inside Intel in the delivery of differentiated multimedia experiences in Atom-processor based SoCs", says Silicon Hive company chief Atul Sinha. Sinha says that the company will be folded into the processor chip giant to help improve the media performance of Atom system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors.

No details yet on how much the deal is worth or when it will get full approval. Intel's current Atom chips are still not as efficient in media performance when compared to Qualcomm's Adreno graphics or NVIDIA's Tegra 2. The purchase of Silicon Hive will hopefully speed up their development in this area.