Intel (Intel) missed the smartphone business opportunity, which is a key to the company's advanced manufacturing process decline from prosperity. Now the company is trying to make a comeback and bet on "RISC-V" to regain its territory occupied by ARM.
ArsTechnica and ExtremeTech reported that Intel spent $1 billion to establish an innovation fund to develop several key technologies, mainly RISC-V. Unlike Intel's own X86 system and ARM architecture, RISC-V is a free open source instruction set architecture (ISA). RISC-V has shown infinite potential in the rapidly growing market of low-power and embedded systems in the next few years.
Intel's investment in RISC-V is not only a meticulous plan, but also a complementary effect. The company's X86 architecture has decades of history, and although it is powerful, it consumes too much power. RISC-V is newer, only appeared ten years ago, and the instruction set is streamlined. Compared with ARM architecture chips, chips using RISC-V are usually smaller in size. However, the ARM architecture has decades of customer feedback and is constantly improving and evolving; by comparison, RISC-V is still immature. Although RISC-V failed to challenge the smartphone chips of ARM architecture, RISC-V has made a way in embedded systems, leveraging another field where ARM dominates.
Intel rebels RISC-V, which seems to mean the company abandons the smartphone market and bet on smaller and lower power chips. Such chips can be used in cars and even smart light trolls, and Intel may intend to squeeze out ARM in these areas. The shipment volume of
RISC-V chips is not small. Taiwanese manufacturer Jingxinke said that the RISC-V system single chip (SoC) with the company's intellectual property rights was 3 billion sets last year. Intel's entry into this market will strengthen its partnership with Crystal and American Business SiFive. Both RISC-V companies are working with TSMC, and the new alliance is expected to assist Intel in grabbing some orders. If the bet is successful, Intel can gain experience in manufacturing low-power chips and compete with TSMC, which specializes in this field.
As time goes by, Intel may be able to use RISC-V's expertise in other markets, such as ARM architecture chips used in automotive brake controllers to data centers and other products. However, whether Intel can do it still needs to be questioned. In addition, Intel has only invested $1 billion. Is such a bet enough?
