Intel Announces Billion-Dollar Development Fund, Boosts RISC-V Processors

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www.extremetech.com, Feb. 09, 2022 – 

Intel has announced a billion-dollar development fund to support its nascent foundry ecosystem. IFS (Intel Foundry Services) wants to partner with a range of other firms to develop platform building blocks and software development tools. Its putting a particular emphasis on RISC-V and is already working with Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive and Ventana Micro Systems. All of these companies build or design RISC-V CPUs.

Why RISC-V?

There's been a lot of interest in RISC-V over the last few years, including a noted uptick when Nvidia announced its intent to purchase ARM. Unlike x86 and ARM, RISC-V is an open source ISA without licensing fees. The ISA is flexible and companies can tailor their cores to implement only the instructions they wish to support.

Today, RISC-V CPUs are currently focused in low-power and embedded markets. x86 competes less with these segments. The RISC-V ecosystem is also much younger than the ARM or x86 ecosystems. This means there's more need for the tools IFS wants to prioritize.

The folks at Intel Foundry Services have the difficult task of establishing themselves as a customer-centric brand while carrying the name of a company more known for aggressive competition than for enabling its competitors. ARM and x86 are headed for direct competition, but RISC-V and x86 are not – at least, not in the next few years. Leading with RISC-V lets Intel spend more time talking about the promise and potential of the ecosystem and less time fielding questions about the awkwardness of manufacturing chips for a potential competitor. Investing in the RISC-V ecosystem also helps Intel subtly position itself as distinct from Nvidia/ARM/TSMC.

Finally, focusing on RISC-V moves the focus off of Intel's x86 foundry ecosystem enablement. One of Intel's goals with this initiative is to fund RISC-V software toolchain development in partnership with other companies. If this were an x86-centric project, customers would be asking why Intel wasn't providing those tools already.

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