Intel has entered into a new licensing agreement with competitor ARM to produce ARM-based chips in Intel factories. The deal, announced today at the Intel Developer Forum, is a strategic move from the Santa Clara, CA company to offer its large-scale custom chip manufacturing facilities, which include 10-nanometer production lines, to third-parties, including those using its rival’s technology.
I have a ton of Intel ARM devices already. Perhaps Intel could call these new chips “XScale”. Just thought that up. I’m kind of proud of it.
Well, in fact they’re already produced modern ARM cores embedded in Altera FPGAs (A53).
http://newsroom.altera.com/press-releases/nr-altera-arm-a53.htm
You hit that nail on the head! Exactly what I wanted to point out.
Intel have been producing FPGAs for a few folk and custom stuff and I always assume this was leading to a business inflection point for Intel.
PC sales aren’t stella and average selling price is “stable” which means it’s economic value goes -down- due to inflation.
As I think I’ve remarked on here before, the market for thousand dollar CPUs isn’t huge! There is one with HPC/Gamers but those guys aren’t mass market (big market, just not mass market).
Conclusion. Intel are happy they can be top dog in the fabrication market for the short/mid term as their process and process refinement is, frankly, staggeringly good. They are a good few years ahead of anyone else (Many other companies “sex up” their figure TBH) and have been for a while.
I wonder how long before we see a pairing of ArmV8 cores with, say, an Intel GPU or 4G modem.
The other cash cow I can see for Intel (and Micron) is embedding XPoint non-volatile memory straight onto the die. That, however, is way off. Why? XPoint is -hard-!
RISC-V is also a possible strong point. If they’re first to market with a 14nm superscalar out-of-order four or eight core RISC-V with their own GPU on the die, they could claim the high end of that market like they did PCs and servers.
Why? RISC-V is “just another ISA”. I mean, sure, they have some nice comparisons with ARM cores on their website but I have little idea how much of that comes from micro-architectural improvements and not the ISA.
I’m not trying to shout it down it’s just that it’s a new ISA, binary incompatible with anything, expensive in terms of tool chain and OS roll out (limited numbers of engineers familiar with it).
Why not OpenRISC? Or even dig up F-CPU. Or use MIPS – that’s *very* well supported.
I were fabbing CPUs I’d pick ARM or x86 (joint first place) and then, probably, MIPs or Power (joint 3rd) and then “all the other stuff” (there’s tons of it!).
Is the GPL requirement on the instruction set really so important? Can you elaborate please?
RISC-V is important because the core design itself is open source, yet it has the potential to be reasonably useful for modern workloads. There are some ISA improvements over ARM, but the real benefit is that you can share changes and improvements with people who haven’t signed an NDA with a processor vendor. RISC-V has the potential to do to CPUs what Linux and 386BSD did to commercial Unix, especially now that x86 is really starting to show its age and will hit a permanent performance wall at 7nm.
Sorry but that’s delusional. That could work for a cheap microcontroller bbut not for a high-end CPU.
Or maybe “StrongARM”?
If you can fight them, then join them.
They try with intel inside(tm) on several tablets and phones with horrible results(x86 is not made to run on batteries) so now they switch camps
Did you mean “If you can’t fight them”?
And x86 has been running on batteries for decades now. The last generations have basically been about improving performance/Watt. Intel is trying to decrease the Watts while AMD is trying to increase the performance. Both are doing well, but ARM does seem to improve faster. But Intel switching camps…nope, more like giving up on the purely mobile CPU’s. Atom and higher for tablets and higher are still going to be developed
Exactly what I thought while reading the comment on my battery powered 3.2GHz x86 notebook 😉
http://assets.atlasobscura.com/article_images/33483/image.jpg
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http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-battle-over-net-neutrality…