Intel Acquires Creative's ZiiLabs (3DLabs)

It's been announced this morning that Intel is acquiring ZiiLabs, the subsidiary of Creative Labs that previously was 3DLabs. Intel is gaining "certain engineering resources and assets" plus licensing rights to certain ZiiLabs patents and other technologies surrounding the GPU.

ZiiLabs was 3DLabs up until 2009 when it was rebranded to represent the more diverse range of products coming out of the company. ZiiLabs has been pushing media application processors and other chips. With this new Intel deal, Creative will be hanging onto the StemCell media processor line and ZMS products. Creative has been in poor financial health as of late so this deal with Intel doesn't come as a huge surprise.

It will be interesting to see what intellectual property that Intel gets out of ZiiLabs for graphics processors and how this could impact future Intel GPUs along with their open-source Linux graphics driver.