Intel Licenses SiFive's Portfolio for Intel Foundry Services on 7nm (anandtech.com) 15
An anonymous reader shares a report: Today's announcement from SiFive comes in two parts; this part is significant as it recognizes that Intel will be enabling SiFive's IP portfolio on its 7nm manufacturing process for upcoming foundry customers. We are expecting Intel to offer a wide variety of its own IP, such as some of the x86 cores, memory controllers, PCIe controllers, and accelerators, however the depth of its third party IP support has not been fully established at this point. SiFive's IP is the first (we believe) official confirmation of specific IP that will be supported. Announced earlier this year by Pat Gelsinger, Intel Foundry Services (or IFS) is one prong of Intel's strategy to realign itself with the current and future semiconductor market. Despite having attempted to become a foundry player in the past, whereby they build chips under contract for their customers, it hasn't really worked out that well -- however IFS is a new reinvigoration of that idea, this time with more emphasis on getting it right and expanding the scope.
The words... (Score:1)
I understand the individual words in the summary, but together they mean nothing to me. Who is SiFive? What do they make and what's their portfolio? What does that has to do with Intel's 7nm?
Re:The words... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Weird that you think Intel is "no longer a vertical" because they are supporting specific external IPs on their foundry business, which has absolutely 0 to do with being a "vertical" or not.
Intel is still a "vertical" this has nothing to do with that, in addition to making their own end to end designs and silicon in their own fabs they also use some external fab services. This doesn't make them fabless or "not vertical" whatever you imagine that to mean.
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SiFive is the only maker of RISCV machines that are not embedded (so many of them!) or shitty dev boards. You probably heard who Intel is already. Intel and AMD implementations of x86 are optimized up the wazoo but there's just too much 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit/insane decoder/too strong memory model/quirky exceptions/etc baggage that needs to be gotten rid of. RISCV is much newer and cleaner than ARM, and especially doesn't suffer from all the business drama.
Itanic has failed because at that time the world wa
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Or so last week's rumour goes, Intel offered to buy them for $2billion.
That might seem bad for consumers. After all, the reason for the explosion in cheap ARM single board computers inspired by Raspberry Pi is that Intel couldn't offer anything comparable for under $100. And disillusionment with ARM being a single company soon to be owned by Nvidia has people exploring an open ISA owned by everyone and no one.
Business wise, Intel are losing out to Nvidia if they do end up acquiring ARM, AMD partner with Sam
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Itanic has failed because at that time the world was still Windows centric, and also the arch had too many untested ideas, while RISCV is a traditional arch, just with 30+ years of lessons fixed.
Windows lost the battle for the server before Itanic sank. It failed not because of anything to do with Windows, but because it was super expensive and also never delivered on its performance promises because Intel never delivered a magic compiler.
What? (Score:1)
intriguing (Score:1)
finally, efficient chips will come out from Intel (Score:1)
I wouldn't be surprised if they mess up this opportunity, nor if the competition beats them on performance; but it's good to see a major foundry planning to make high-performance risc-v processors. I hope it will result in worthwhile risc-v CPUs and GPUs in the near future.
Look forward to the Gary explains video. (Score:2)
To Serve...automotive. (Score:2)
Despite having attempted to become a foundry player in the past, whereby they build chips under contract for their customers, it hasn't really worked out that well -- however IFS is a new reinvigoration of that idea, this time with more emphasis on getting it right and expanding the scope.
Does the automotive industry know about this?
Licensing on behalf of Foundry customers (Score:2)
What this licensing means is that a customer that wants to make a product with SiFive processor IP on an Intel process only has to pay in one place.
Foundry customers range from those who whip only the layout to the fab to those to roll up without even RTL and buy design services as well as fabrication. For the later it's much easier to include IP licensing with the design services instead of trying to buy them separately.
This does not mean that Intel is going to stop making x86 products. Indeed, x86 process
Wait a second.. (Score:2)
I think RISC V was open.
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The ISA might be but they can still patent hardware implementation details just like Intel and AMD have patents on how to implement X86 in hardware.