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Intel Licenses ARM Technology to Boost Foundry Business
- baq 10y agothis is not unheard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale still looks like big news
- SixSigma 10y agoMay 17, 2011 http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-we-have-arm-license-no-plans-to-use-it/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-we-have-arm-license-no-pl... > "So the short answer is, ‘No, we have no intention of using our own license to build ARM processors,'" Otellini said. > Instead Intel is making a bet that in the long run its silicon process technology and manufacturing capabilities will give it an edge over the many fabless chip companies that design ARM SOCs and rely on foundries to manufacture them.
- kikoreis 10y agoActually, this announcement is about licensing ARM's physical IP to enable the Intel foundries to fab ARM SoCs for other companies, not about Intel building its own ARM SoCs. I'm pretty sure their long bet on x86 SoCs remains unchanged.
- cm3 10y agoFor someone not versed in the specifics of chip engineering, what is the "physical IP"? Is it the process and how the wafers are made?
- j1vms 10y agoARM's IP (intellectual property) consists of designs (that is, layouts) of ARM CPUs, SoCs, etc. It would very likely not include semiconductor manufacturing processes to achieve a final implementation of said design, though I may be incorrect on this point.
- BooneJS 10y agoIf Soft IP were VHDL or Verilog files, then Physical IP is result of the physical design of those hardware descriptions into a database for base layer and masks.
- bedros 10y agowhen designing SOC's you write your IP in verilog or vhdl, however high performance IP such as a CPU are designed specifically for certain chip process, (Intel's 10nm or TSMC's 16nm) and you don't get it in source code (verilog) instead you buy the physical IP (sometimes call hard IP) which is literally bolted to the die next to your design and wired with your design. So, if I'm designing mobile SOC and need 2Ghz CPU in my SOC design, I check with Intel or TSMC to see if they have HardIP of that CPU that I need.
- snuxoll 10y ago> I'm pretty sure their long bet on x86 SoCs remains unchanged. For the time being Intel has killed any remaining products that could hope to compete with ARM, that's why there is no non-pro Surface 4 because Intel killed Braxton and any successor products.
- kikoreis 10y agoYeah, it's certainly true that the existing SoC product plans were canned. But a lot will need to happen before Intel comes to the point of reevaluating its x86 ISA platform strategy.
- mtgx 10y agoPrecisely why it doesn't really mean anything right now. Let's see if Intel can actually make something out of this. Intel had XScale and squandered that opportunity because it saw ARM as a "conflict of interest" internally. Intel has also spent over $10 billion investing in trying to enter the mobile market with its own Atom chips, and so far that has only led to a silent exit from the market. So yeah...let's see what happens in 5 years with Intel's "ARM business".
- tracker1 10y agoI think in this case it's opening itself to acting as a fab for other parties... in this case, they have capacity that exceeds the damand for their x86 parts, and they have a process advantage to other foundary producers. So this could allow them to utilize the extra production capacity while they have that process advantage. Beyond this, even for designs that don't need the most current process, it could allow Intel to use prior plants to produce ARM chips for other clients as well. It's become clear that the demand for ARM will not shift towards lower power x86, and that x86 is unlikely to meet the power draw of arm in the near term.
- BooneJS 10y agoAll this to try to win Apple's SoC?
- frankchn 10y agoI assume that since Apple already has a license, so their foundries (whether it be Intel, TSMC, or Samsung) does not need an additional license.
- BooneJS 10y agoIANAL, but I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that the fab needs a license to create a chip containing an ARM processor in it given that it needs the raw GDS2 database that describes the IP in the detail required to manufacture it.
- trsohmers 10y agoThe raw GDS2 that the customer (in this case Apple) contains the information necessary for fabrication, but to make the GDS2 you need to synthesize and place and route based on a standard cell library. Through their acquisition of Artisan IP, ARM sells standard cell, memory, and a bunch of other chip IP other than just their cores, and each needs to be customized to a specific fabrication process. Intel is paying ARM to customize their IP for their foundry so that it provides a lower barrier of entry to anyone using ARM IP to switch from GloFo/TSMC/Samsung/etc to Intel. Oh, and all fabs require any IP as intricate as a memory or standard cell library to go through their verification process, as cell characterization is crucial to getting good yield (and not interfering with any other designs in the case of multi project wafers).
- simonh 10y agoThe foundry also needs a Foundry License from ARM [0]. But as has been pointed out, Intel already manufactures SOCs containing ARM cores, in particular the Stratix 10 [1], though Intel isn't listed by ARM as a Foundry License holder. I suspect there are many variations and intricacies to the ARM licensing system that aren't public knowledge. We just don't really know what licensing deal Intel has. For example, do they have a Design license now? If they do, they may well want to keep that private info until they have product to announce. [0] https://www.arm.com/products/buying-guide/licensing/processor-foundry-program.php https://www.arm.com/products/buying-guide/licensing/processo... [1] https://www.altera.com/products/fpga/stratix-series/stratix-10/overview.html https://www.altera.com/products/fpga/stratix-series/stratix-...
- djcapelis 10y agoIntel's always maintained some of the leading fabs with technology usually a fair bit ahead of their competitors, but it is losing an entire segment of the processor design space. It is pretty big news that instead of continuing to make their own plays at these markets, (which haven't worked out) they're allowing others to ship their own ARM designs using their fabs. Intel's competitive advantage has always had a lot to do with the integration and bundling of world class fabrication technology and their processor designs pushing each other forward. They've increasingly broken this cycle in the past few years, with the final demise of tick-tock and the continued number of devices which opt for ARM. It's another in a series of developments that are reshaping the processor market and slowly moving Intel from a dominant position to a supportive one. There's still a large number of brilliant engineers and amazingly competent people there. I wonder when they're gonna start really fighting for their future.
- lnanek2 10y ago"fighting for their future" is often shooting themselves in the foot in my experience. A company I was at agreed to transition off of ARM to x86 for the next cost down revision of their embedded product. During the negotiations Intel promised libhoudini ARM translation support. Once we were committed and many weeks down the design path with development boards they broke their promise and refused to provide libhoudini. It was a really terrible position to be in because Intel was forcing us to get all our very expensive third party software relicensed in x86 versions, and we had no money for that. Honestly, we would have been a lot better off just sticking with ARM instead of buying Intel's lies. In the end, if Intel had provided an ARM option, though, they would have been a competitive solution at least instead what they were which was just a bad idea. So this insistence on fighting to get companies on x86 is not helping them necessarily.
- djcapelis 10y agoI agree their existing attempts have been disheartening and hard to watch. I don't think fighting for their future necessarily involves keeping x86 as their only chip architecture. I think that right now their "fights" and entries into these markets have mostly involved trying to keep the world from changing, not really fighting to survive. Less new and interesting strategies, more taking out old dusty x86 cores, polishing them up a bit and shoving them into the packages and market segments where they aren't dominant. This is their fault at this point. It used to be that without x86 compat, you had an uphill battle. They don't have that high ground anymore. The fact that companies like yours were more locked to ARM than other options should be a huge, amazingly large warning sign for them. I think what they should have done was the work the RISC-V team already started. I'm not sure they have the right architects to do it there though, frankly. The last time they tried to start a new architecture they really messed up on keeping it simple and providing clean hardware. They didn't recover confidence after Itanium and I think there was probably a lot of "Never Again" sentiment (probably rightfully so) both inside and outside the company. But I think at some point it is going to become clear to them that they don't have any option but to try a move that desperate and risky again if they want to be a dominant player in the processor design business in the future. Who knows if they'll actually get it right though. I probably would bet against it and would expect them to shift more and more towards a legacy designer (see also IBM) with substantial fab tech and capabilities that remain world class even if the processor design part loses most of the device markets.
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- tambourine_man 10y agoFunny how both Apple and Intel (xscale) had a bet on ARM, chose to abandon it, only to come back to it later. Apple's history with ARM is particularly interesting and not very well known IMO. It looks like this Intel's new move will be at least as fun to watch.
- protomyth 10y agoDid Apple really have any choice but to sell its ARM interest?
- tambourine_man 10y agoI've heard it was what prevented them from going bankrupt immediately. The hundreds of millions they got from selling it (at a loss, IIRC) kept the lights on long enough for them get on their feet again.
- protomyth 10y agoI'm pretty sure it wasn't at a loss.
- jvickers 10y agoI wonder if they would be open to fabbing AMD Zen chips.
- avs733 10y agoThis seems about 3 years to late and 6 years after they should have. Processors are a symbiosis of design and manufacturing. Intel pursued the objective function of manufacturing way way to far down a local optimum.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoWell that feels a bit like when Intel caved and put the AMD64 extensions into x86, and a bit not. I saw an interesting draft of a white paper that was pointing out the challenge of maintaining a technical advantage when you have to fab your chips with someone else. Especially if that someone else is under the nominal influence of a nation state that is hostile to your best interests. It was arguing that either Global Foundries needed to be "aligned" with US interests and oversight, or Intel needed to be drafted as "America's chip baker." The consequence of not doing so would be to create a threat to national security where the government had no way to procure the volume and complexity of chips they would need from a source they could be 100% sure was not out to get them. And then there was this IDF announcement. It is amazing how hard it is to imagine building a chip company "from scratch" which includes fabrication facilities. And it is hard not to see how important such chips have become in our day to day lives.
- walterbell 10y agoOn the subject of alignment: ARM now belongs to Japan (Softbank), which would be a TPP participant. Could other countries pursue open-source chip designs?
- microcolonel 10y agoThere are some promising ins for that; but it would involve a lot of investment in software infrastructure and application developer outreach to get a new ISA to the masses. A good way to start would be to have Android running on RISC-V. Seems like it'll be some time still. ;-) If you meant open source ARM chip designs, I don't think that would be possible given the patent constraints of the ISA. ARM would need to relinquish the (immensely profitable) legal monopoly they hold on their ISA features.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThe opportunity for countries to pursue open source chip designs already exists, what is not easy is for a country to develop a semiconductor manufacturing capability that is equivalent to a modern chip factory. Everything from sourcing silicon to the wafers to the packaging is such an amazingly intricate supply chain that it is a huge undertaking to try to develop it. That said, I'm interested how you see TPP influencing the evolution (or distribution) of ARM manufacturers. Or the cost for ARM chips for that matter.
- cft 10y agoQuestion is why Intel did not just buy ARM, instead of Softbank?
- rando832 10y agoanti-trust I'm sure.
- cptskippy 10y agoIntel really wants to be completely vertically integrated and that would be hard to reconcile with ARM's decidedly horizontal structure. If they had purchased them then they'd have probably sabotaged ARM to promote their x86 business so we're better off. It probably would have been better strategically to buy them and in hindsight they never should have sold XScale to Marvell but Intel isn't know to strategize. They just sort of blindly charged forward until they hit a brick wall then pivot and charge in the next direction. You saw this with Itanium, Netburst, Atom, and CMOS sensors. It's what they do.
- xenadu02 10y agoIt's also incompatible with Intel's desire for high margins. My guess is this is an experiment or a way to burn excess capacity?
- cptskippy 10y agoThat's entirely possible and they could also spin their own silicon for ARM instead of just doing a cookie cutter job. This might however end up like their attempts to take over 4G where they either can't get power utilization under control or they price themselves out of the market.
- spullara 10y agoThey have to do this to get a return on their fabs. You basically have to run them near capacity and x86 is being used in fewer and fewer devices.
- jhallenworld 10y agoIntel already makes chips with ARM cores: Altera's Stratix-10 FPGAs have quad-core Cortex-A53s and are manufactured on Intel's 14nm process.
- rphlx 10y agoThey paper launched like 4 years ago, but FWIH they're still not in vol production yet. Many tapeout delays.
- woodandsteel 10y agoIntel had no choice but to make this move. That is because it has failed in the mobile and embedded/IoT space, and it isn't selling enough x86 chips to keep its new fabs up to capacity, so it needs to also make ARM chips. That said, the economics of this are pretty uncertain. Intel's business model is to spend an enormous amount of money on process R and D and cutting-edge fabs so it can produce the most advanced chips, and charge premium prices that pay off these costs. It can charge such high prices because x86 dominated computing, and it has had little real competition in the x86 space. The ARM model, in contrast is to produce large numbers of chips at low cost for markets with many competitors and intense price competition. If Intel charges typical ARM prices, it won't be making enough money to pay for its fabs and R and D costs. If it charges premium prices, it will be more expensive than everyone else and won't sell many chips, and again won't make much money. My guess is Intel will go the latter route and make a relatively small number of premium ARM chips for the highest-end, most expensive smartphones. Better than nothing, but hardly a great success.
- majewsky 10y agoI don't expect a market for highest-end, expensive ARM SoCs. Who's gonna buy those? The few people that want an expensive smartphone just for the heck of it are buying iPhones, anyway. The interesting markets right now are China, India and the developing countries. Good luck selling highest-end expensive smartphones there.
- simonh 10y agoI wouldn't count iPhones out of this. The 10nm process means chips half the size of those from Samsung and TSMC. I imagine Apple will be very interested in that. They've also been trying to move completely away from Samsung for years, but TSMC doesn't have the capacity to carry all their production needs. Intel does. In terms of what in 'interesting' it depends what you are interested in. Yes all the sales growth is in low end phones, but high end phones are still selling in the hundreds of millions and still commanding decent margins, if only for Apple at least. That market isn't going away.
- msh 10y ago
- xlayn 10y agoAnother fab should mean options and with that price decrease. I wonder how much a given chip price can be decreased with this move. Another way of reading this is that making more use of a given tech should pay the initial cost faster thus making possible more research and improved processes. Sadly another way of reading this is that Intel doesn't have any tech that would capitalize in better chips anymore.
- hamidpalo 10y agoRelevant quote from Otellini, the former CEO "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought." It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. "The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes." Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-otellinis-intel-can-the-company-that-built-the-future-survive-it/275825/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-o...
- dbcurtis 10y agoAndy Grove famously said: "We have a simple strategy. We build fabs, and then we fill them." That is not just a glib remark. Intel builds leading edge fabs, and runs them very well. Then it simply looks at every design it could run, and ranks them by gross margin per wafer. When the fab is full, low margin projects either run on non-Intel fabs or alternatively the teams get redeployed. And the kind of fab capacity Intel has is a strategic weapon. If Intel decides your corner of the market is going to be paved with silicon, prepare to get paved over. My take on Intel licensing ARM is two-fold: 1) They have decided the gross margin per wafer of running some ARMs is looking pretty good, and 2) they perceive a benefit of using Intel's fab technology as a strategic weapon to own as much of the ARM market as they want.
- mafuyu 10y agoThe foundries have been consolidated to a select few, and it's been increasingly difficult for Intel to stay competitive on both the design and fab front. People have been talking about when Intel is going to spin off their fabs (or design, depending on how you see it), and I see this as being the first step.
- Aissen 10y agoExcellent remark. I'm wondering how they'd do that though. A quick search tells us a standard Intel CPU is in the 200-300mm² range. A server one might go to the 400-600mm² range. A high-end (higher margin) ARM SoC like the A9x is in the 150-200mm² range. I'm guessing it's the same for qcomm/samsung/lg's offering. How would it be more profitable to go from a $30-$50 SoC to an $300-$900 one ? Even when accounting for processor node differences (negligible between Samsung and Intel at 14nm or TSMC at 16nm), I can't see an ARM chip bringing high-enough margin. Unless they envision some magical tiny IoT chip that would be expensive ? Or that smartphone SoCs price will continue to go higher? What am I missing ? Are they preparing for the end of the x86 PC/Server market (hence the need to fill the fabs) ?
- ghshephard 10y agoI think you're touching on something important - the refresh cycle for PCs/Laptops is going to very soon be transitioning from the traditional 2-year cycle to 3-years, and, in the case of desktops, we're going to be seeing people run their systems for 4, even 5 years before considering upgrading. Combine this trend (which I think we can all agree on), with the fact that for a lot of people, their dominant computer is their smart phone/phablet, which is being refreshed every two-years, and you can see that fairly soon (if not already) Intel Fabs that focus on making chips for the desktop/laptop market will be underutilized - and there is a lot of capital tied up in those.
- robot 10y agoits pretty interesting that ARM was able to gain so much foothold from the UK while historically there were so many competing cpu architectures in the market.
- jwr 10y agoAgain? Perhaps not everyone here remembers, but StrongARM (Xscale) was a thing back in the day.
- throw2016 10y agoI find the chain of events a bit ominous frankly. How does Intel's high cost structure and margins sync with $10-30 SOCs? It's already tried and failed with its own mobile offerings. On the other side ARM is beginning to deliver increasingly powerful SOCs that are at least getting close to Intel's woeful laptop cpu offerings. It was looking like Intel could be in trouble. I mean why spend $150-300 just for CPU when you can get a powerful SOC for $10-30 with CPU, GPU and Memory all in one? There was no way Intel could compete with that. If ARM desktops started appearing with proper Linux and Windows support, or Apple decided to put the iPad Pro SOC in a Macbook it could be trouble. Fortunately for Intel ARM chooses not to focus on this market even though the potential for low cost desktops and laptops powered by ARM is huge, with great cost savings for consumers. Driver issues hold back independent efforts. Vulcan and the new generation of mobile GPUs offer a ray of hope. Then out of the blue Softbank buys ARM. Now Intel is licensing ARM nevermind Intel business model does not allow the kind of low cost SOCs ARM is popular for. I hope this is not the beginning of ARM SOCs becoming pricey so Intel is less threatend in its X86 business, that in the absence of competition has frankly become extremely expensive and uncompetitive.
- Roboprog 10y agoPerhaps in the future Intel will be making "N core" ARM chips for data center blades, where N is a largish number with a killer bus / cache stack attached??? Something to be said for low power systems to pass all that relatively simple web traffic (JSON -> prepared statement ... row -> JSON) between the outside world and the databases, which might still well benefit from higher power / performance x86 chips. (who knows, maybe 128 low power cores serves a database better than x86, also, I can't say -- although being charged per-core by Oracle for little cores would really suck) I'm a software guy, so feel free to expand on why this is BS, or not, hardware guys/gals.