Intel announces efforts to accelerate RISC-V development and adoption, including licensing plans, chip manufacturing partners, and a $1B IFS Innovation Fund
The new licensing, manufacturing-partner, and fund initiatives turn that earlier product-level involvement into a broader effort to attract RISC-V development around Intel Foundry Services.
First-order effects
Intel gives RISC-V developers and chip manufacturers a more explicit route to use licensing support, manufacturing partnerships, and the $1B IFS Innovation Fund through its foundry operation.
SiFive's role in Intel's RISC-V plans becomes more consequential after Intel's earlier IP license, as Intel expands the surrounding development and production ecosystem.
Second-order effects
RISC-V chip designers gain another potential commercialization path through Intel Foundry Services, making access to manufacturing part of the competition for architecture adoption.
Companies building around RISC-V face a more coordinated Intel offering that combines IP-related plans, development support, capital, and foundry relationships rather than a standalone platform.
Third-order effects
The initiative points toward open RISC-V being commercialized through integrated ecosystems of IP, developer platforms, financing, and foundry capacity—not only through the architecture's open specification.
If other manufacturers organize comparable support, RISC-V adoption will be shaped increasingly by which production ecosystems developers can access.
The trend: RISC-V is moving from an open architecture project toward a foundry-backed commercial ecosystem that combines design support, capital, and manufacturing access.
$1 billion to support startups and established companies building disruptive technologies for the foundry ecosystem. Learn how @Intel is accelerating foundry customers' time to market. https://www.intel.com/...
@IanCutress Mobile EyeQ Ultra based on RISC-V. An Intel ‘company’ with some autonomy within Intel chooses to convert from MIPs to RISC-V versus X86? Must have been a good discussion.
@oak8292 As you said, they have autonomy. Old Intel was all about shoehorning in Intel CPU and Intel process, but look how quickly the Altera acquisition fell flat. They're learning. Also, https://www.youtube.com/...
Through a partnership w/ @Intel Capital and IFS, we're creating a $1 bln fund to support 2 key strategic inflections: enabling modular products w/an Open Chiplet Platform, and supporting ISA-leveraged design approaches incl. #x86, #Arm, and #RISCV. https://www.intel.com/...
Also: Intel $1B innovation fund from Foundry + Capital for foundry ecosystem support. The fact that the fund is steered by Intel Capital is going to be interesting - Capital hasn't gone after foundry ecosystem partners in the same way before, mostly end-point investments
Intel's $1B innovation fund is separate to IFS Accelerator, its new ecosystem alliance. Accelerator is about helping IP vendors get started at IFS and customers using that IP at IFS
Intel becomes Premier member of RISC-V International. Bob Brennan, Vice President of Customer Solutions Engineering for Intel Foundry Services, will be joining both the RISC-V Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee.
I love this, I have to support Intel's move in this space out of principle. For the sake of posterity, I won't delete my TikTok video making fun of Intel. https://twitter.com/...