intel "Wait, weren't we supposed to be the bad guys?"; Intel pledges to invest a billion dollars into foundry startups, joins RISC-V International

[BachChain]

Summary

Intel Foundry Services and Intel Capital today announced the creation of an investment fund aimed at semiconductor foundry startups and small businesses. The fund, totaling at one billion dollars, is intended to help develop disruptive technology and reduce time-to-market, with an emphasis on MCMs and RISC-V. This came alongside the announcement of Intel joining RISC-V International, a nonprofit intended to help promote the RISC-V ISA.

 

Quotes

Quote

Intel is an innovation powerhouse, but we know that not all good ideas originate from within our four walls,” said Randhir Thakur, president of Intel Foundry Services. “Innovation thrives in open and collaborative environments. This $1 billion fund in partnership with Intel Capital – a recognized leader in venture capital investing – will marshal the full resources of Intel to drive innovation in the foundry ecosystem.

Quote

A robust ecosystem is critical to helping foundry customers bring their designs to life using IFS technologies. The new innovation fund was created to strengthen the ecosystem in three ways:

• Equity investments in disruptive startups.
• Strategic investments to accelerate partner scale-up.
• Ecosystem investments to develop disruptive capabilities supporting IFS customers.

 

My thoughts

I have a feeling this little more than Intel letting these companies do all the hard work before buying them and taking the fruits for themselves.

 

Sources

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-1b-fund-risc-v

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-launches-1-billion-fund-build-foundry-innovation-ecosystem.html

[GhostRoadieBL]

it's like they're coming up on tax season with a very successful set of 12th gen launches and a higher than usual margin year and need to hide the profits into "infrastructure investments" or "investment funds for small businesses we will later buy and merge into our own company" which can be filed for depreciation and losses over the next 10 tax years.

[Zodiark1593]

Would not be the first time Intel tried to break away from x86. Getting some competing designs going could be useful down the road. Grow that talent pool, and you have good pickings for when you finally want to jump to RISC-V in earnest. 

[Lightwreather]

Wait, this is a version of "If you can't buy 'em, join 'em?"

Wel, either way, having the backing of a large tech giant, especially one in the same space, seems like a good thing.....

Unless they try to pull a google

[Mark Kaine]

5 hours ago, J-from-Nucleon said:

Wait, this is a version of "If you can't buy 'em, join 'em?"

i mean, its not dumb, they dont even need to outright buy anything, they can just hire some of the talent (later on, if needed)

Intel knows the x86 architecture is long past its prime…

 

 

[Mihle]

They most likely know it's a good chance ARM will take over for x86 over long time, so they want to invest in something that could possibly take over ARM in the long run.

 

Seem logical to me.

[Dracarris]

ARM is a sensible intermediate solution before we turn to RISCV which is basically ARM without crippling license costs that even shy off giants like Google and Nvidia (they heavily invested into RISCV to use such cores for control tasks on their hardware platforms which used to be ARM).