The 'substantial contributions' Intel has promised to boost RISC-V adoption

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www.theregister.com, May. 17, 2022 – 

ANALYSIS Here's something that would have seemed outlandish only a few years ago: to help fuel Intel's future growth, the x86 giant has vowed to do what it can to make the open-source RISC-V ISA worthy of widespread adoption.

In a presentation, an Intel representative shared some details of how the chipmaker plans to contribute to RISC-V as part of its bet that the instruction set architecture will fuel growth for its revitalized contract chip manufacturing business.

While Intel invested in RISC-V chip designer SiFive in 2018, the semiconductor titan's intentions with RISC-V evolved last year when it revealed that the contract manufacturing business key to its comeback, Intel Foundry Services, would be willing to make chips compatible with x86, Arm, and RISC-V ISAs. The chipmaker then announced in February it joined RISC-V International, the ISA's governing body, and launched a $1 billion innovation fund that will support chip designers, including those making RISC-V components.

How Intel plans to contribute to RISC-V

At RISC-V Week in Paris this month, Gary Martz, senior director of RISC-V ecosystem enablement for Intel Foundry Services, said Intel plans to make additional "substantial contributions" to the system-on-chip architecture and software stack for RISC-V as part of its RISC-V International membership.

"Our intention is that with these contributions along with the innovation fund, we'll help drive an ecosystem [that] will continue to fuel the growth of RISC-V and the adoption of RISC-V cores," he said at the event.

Martz added Intel "will help evaluate the current gaps and will contribute resources to drive closure where we can help," referring to the fact that RISC-V right now lacks many features found in the x86 and Arm ISAs that are important to gain traction in markets like PCs and servers.

On the SoC side, Martz said Intel will contribute in areas like boot security, firmware resilience, partitioning, isolation, virtualization, and performance monitoring. He said the company's contributions will also focus on fabrics infrastructure for multi-core chip architectures, standard internal buses for various bus types, and holistic debut solutions and interfaces.

A slide provided by Martz also mentioned Intel will look to optimize SoC architecture features for specific segments, like reliability, availability, and serviceability features in datacenters; functional safety features in vehicles; and power management features in mobile devices.

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