Intel To Work With Arm on Chip Manufacturing Compatibility (reuters.com) 22
Intel on Wednesday said its chip contract manufacturing division will work with U.K.-based chip designer Arm to ensure that mobile phone chips and other products that use Arm's technology can be made in Intel's factories. From a report: Once the biggest name in chips known as central processing units (CPUs), Intel has seen long seen its technological manufacturing edge blunted by rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world leader in making chips for customers such as Apple. Intel's turnaround strategy hinges in part on opening up its factories to other chip companies, particularly those in mobile phones. It has said firms such as Qualcomm are planning to use its factories for future chip designs. "There is growing demand for computing power driven by the digitization of everything, but until now ... customers have had limited options for designing around the most advanced mobile technology," Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief executive, said in a statement.
Tech transfer (Score:2)
This sounds like a good way for them to find out how their rivals like TSMC does things too.
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This is good news for everyone (Score:3)
Intel making ARM chips, Microsoft running Linux in Azure... in business you either adapt or you die. No one wants to be the next Blockbuster or Kodak.
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Intel were making their own ARM-based silicon 20-something years ago, first under the StrongARM brand (which they bought from DEC) and then as XScale.
IIRC, they were a bit... meh.
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Here’s an early ARM based prototype from DEC. Always wanted one for my collection. https://wiki.preterhuman.net/D... [preterhuman.net]
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StrongARM was the best ARM implementation on the market when Intel bought it, and XScale powered a generation of hand-helds from Palm, Motorola, Sharp, Compaq and others. Intel sold it because Otellini as CEO was betting on "x86 everywhere" and thought they could make Atom competitive in hand-held and embedded applications (spoiler: they couldn't).
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You aren't remembering correctly IMO. For ARM, the StrongARM were pretty incredible and were under-utilized by Intel. Their sell-off (to Marvell IIRC) was a bit of a WTF, as the chips and the integrations (eg. Gumstix made some really cool stuff) were about the best cheap development boards available.
It's easy to forget how quickly ARM has improved in the past several years alone. At that time, people said ARM was about as advanced as it'll ever be, and soon destined for the dustbin with MIPS and SPARC.
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No, they were great, actually. They were the fastest ARM chips around. The PXA255 running at 400MHz was a positive screamer. But then they did the PXA270 which did 200-something and 312MHz and you could immediately tell it was slower. There were 600MHz PXA270 chips which did go, but those were rare.
After it got sold to Marvell, it
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> Blockbuster failed due to market forces pivoting faster than they could react.
Their choice of business partners probably didn't help either.
"Enron and Blockbuster Terminate Partnership for Video-on-Demand"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/S... [wsj.com]
Re: This is good news for everyone (Score:2)
Err, IBM are still around and in good health.
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No one wants to be the next Blockbuster or Kodak.
Kodak? Who wouldn't want their company to have a dominant run of 100+ years?
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I understand the intended point; and Kodak certainly frittered away a very real chance to have remained dominant into the digital era. But how many companies can claim their track record?
It's like "sure, it was the Roman Empire - but what have they done lately?"
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There is something of a smell of decline here, but yes, Intel could turn this to their advantage. If they make a half-decent Arm chip, then the not-quite-Apple-but-nearly type players might use an Intel Arm rather than making their own Arm designs (like Apple do). If Intel were about as good as you could ever do yourself, then they're a good option rather than making your own (which really, only very rich companies can really do, whereas pretty much anyone can buy some chips from the Intel catalogue).
I have
Since They Have Gotten Out Of The Server Biz (Score:2)
Might as well double down on making chips.
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Who, Intel? ARM has been an IP-only company for decades at this point.
Intel's not doing so well on the chip manufacturing department. AMD is eating their lunch. I suspect they're going to try to pivot to ARM and take a page from the Apple playbook - but we'll see.
ARM poses more possibilities for the future at this point, I think. x86 is a lot of extra legacy bloat, and as Apple has proven, it isn't even necessary to move forward.
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Yes, Intel.
https://www.servethehome.com/b... [servethehome.com]
Pure Marketing (Score:1)
1. Intel has made ARM chips before ( and probably never really stopped ).
2. ARM chips have been synthesized to many, many fab processes.
3. There's nothing special Intel needs to do to support ARM, other than support the standard ASIC EDA flows stuff, which they already do.
Other than issue a press release, what could they actually do that they already haven't done?