The takeover of ARM by Nvidia aborted, Intel sees a breach opening up on low-power architectures and creates a fund to support the rise in power of RISC-V.
Intel has announced the establishment of a billion-dollar support and innovation fund through which the company will bet on a few key technologies, including RISC-V. This free, open-source instruction set has great potential for anything related to low-power embedded systems.
Of course, this investment comes at a time that is not insignificant, just days after the announcement of the failure of the takeover of ARM by Nvidia. This 80 billion dollar agreement posed too great a risk to the balance of the market and free competition in the eyes of the regulators. Its process, slowed down by several investigations, was finally interrupted by both parties.
The British chip designer ARM, in the hands of the Japanese group SoftBank, is therefore heading towards an IPO to finance itself. This leaves an opening for Intel, which does not intend to miss it, after having missed the mobile revolution. While RISC-V is not as mature an architecture as ARM can be today, it does have plenty of room for maneuver and is a perfect complement to Intel’s larger, more powerful and power-hungry x86 chips.
Embedded Systems and the Internet of Things
Obviously, the idea would be to leave the field open to ARM for the uses in which these chips excel (like processors in our smartphones and tablets, for example) to seek to impose RISC-V in a whole bunch of other objects connected and embedded systems. This represents, on a global scale, billions – even tens of billions – of chips to be supplied each year. A volume of production such that it could revive Intel, knowing in addition that the company invests massively in the creation of new factories, in particular in the United States (Arizona and Ohio).
The companies Andes Technology and SiFive, respectively based in Taiwan and the United States and whose RISC-V chips are engraved by TSMC, could work closely with Intel. Pat Gelsinger, Intel boss and fine technician, certainly does not want to miss this opportunity. It remains to be seen whether the billion dollars with which this support fund is endowed will be sufficient.