[simon.a.billington]

The problem is their technology was heavily invested in relying on the SHARC processors.

It seems while all the other chip manufacturers like Intel, AMD and even Apple now have aggressively improved the performance of their chips over time. Meanwhile, it would seem that SHARC did very little. Now 10 or so years later the modern CPU can do everything the SHARC could does well as run the OS and other apps on top of that and even have room for more.

On top of that they're so many other competitors in the plugin game. Not just the big developers, but alot of smaller ones now too. The democratisation of music creation has also meant the democratisation of plugin development too. So people could now invest less than the UAD platform and get just as much millage out of it, if not more.

It's no wonder they started investing in the Luna ecosystem, even started packaging their tech as guitar solutions and partnering up with Townsend to bring us their mic modelling solution. Though, it would seem that none of this was enough to offset the slow demise of their SHARC-based DSP technology. They could go on to reinvent it, maybe based on an ARM chip, but this may just cost them too much time and energy...

...which is probably why we've seen those layoffs.