Intel announces its participation in RISC-V International
Intel announced that it will invest $1 billion in a fund to support companies in the industry building disruptive technologies for the foundry ecosystem. By leveraging Intel Foundry Services (IFS), the fund will help foundry customers accelerate time-to-market through investments covering intellectual property, software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies. Intel will also form partnerships with fund-aligned companies to enable modular products through an open chiplet platform that supports multiple instruction set architectures, including x86, Arm, and RISC-V.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said foundry customers are rapidly adopting a modular design approach to differentiate products and speed time to market. With Intel’s new investment fund and open chiplet platform that can help drive the ecosystem to develop disruptive technologies across a full range of chip architectures, IFS is leading the way for major changes in the industry.
In addition, Intel announced its participation in RISC-V International, a global non-profit organization supporting the RISC-V instruction set architecture and extensions, with nearly 300 corporate members. Intel said it is working with leading partners in the RISC-V ecosystem and plans to offer a range of proven RISC-V IP cores that are performance-optimized for different market segments. Optimized through IFS’ process technology to ensure that all types of RISC-V cores, from embedded to high performance, are operating at their best.
Intel is no stranger to RISC-V, and last year was interested in spending more than $2 billion to acquire SiFive. After Intel released the IDM 2.0 strategy, SiFive has announced that it will cooperate with Intel, and its related IP can use Intel’s foundry service business (IFS). At the same time, Intel also builds its own RISC-V development platform “Horse Creek” based on SiFive’s Performance P550, which is manufactured using a 7nm process.
