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Intel discontinues pathfinder for RISC-V program
- amelius 4y agoReasons?
- Tuna-Fish 4y agoSuddenly they don't have infinite money anymore.
- phkahler 4y agoNor a state of the art foundry.
- dragonelite 4y agoWell if they can get sub 10nm at scale going they should be fine for western semi conductor companies. Its their only way if amazon, microsoft and other cloud providers charting their own semi conductor future with ARM and RISCV. Im sure with the US killing the Taiwans semi industry, by moving its semi fabs to Arizona intel will have no problems recruiting some of the talent.
- justinclift 4y ago> Im sure with the US killing the Taiwans semi industry, by moving its semi fabs to Arizona ... That doesn't seem to be the goal though?
- baq 4y agoDude the US is trying to not get choked by a semi shortage when China invades Taiwan and the fabs located there blow themselves up before they get exported onto the mainland. Same for EU with their fab investments.
- hasmanean 4y agoLol. /tongue in cheek comment to follow … They should just move the UN to Taiwan and supply the world…use microchips for peace…deny chip shipments to any country that invades another. /end We can have peace in our time.
- luma 4y ago> Im sure with the US killing the Taiwans semi industry, by moving its semi fabs to Arizona You have seriously misunderstood the scale of TSMCs moves outside of Taiwan.
- luma 4y agoRISC-V isn't x86, and Intel is pathologically unable to move beyond x86.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- th3sly 4y agoand open source instructions set is an advantage to China as well, perhaps some pressure from "up-there" after the chip act was signed and offered lots of money to private companies?
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoHow does that fit to https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-pro-p550 https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-pro-p550 which is/will be produced in 'Intel 4' (approx 7nm, EUV)?
- guipsp 4y agoThis is a software package. Not wholly related.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoThat would be like saying Intel Vtune is unimportant, because community developed GCC and LLVM are good enough. Maybe they are, meanwhile, but pathfinder also had simulators IIRC?
- jasonwatkinspdx 4y agoThat's Intel's foundry services. SiFive running chips there has nothing to do with Intel's software strategy or internal RISC V initiatives.
- coobird 4y agoLess than a couple months ago, Intel seemed to be very enthusiastic and showcasing a bunch of testimonials from partners: https://riscv.org/blog/2022/12/intel-pathfinder-for-risc-v-new-capabilities-and-a-growing-ecosystem-intel/ https://riscv.org/blog/2022/12/intel-pathfinder-for-risc-v-n...
- pjmlp 4y agoNothing new here, I was at Intel's talk in GDCE 2009 about how Larrabee was going to change the world of graphics programming. See also Edison, StrongARM,...
- lloydatkinson 4y agoI get the feeling internally Intel is following the unfortunately popular paradigms and ideas that Agile (note the capital A instead of lower) enables. Commitments to work without anyone asking for it When someone does ask for work, the requirements go through N number of middle management layers blurring them every step of the way like Chinese Whispers Projects must continue even when it is clear it's going to be a failure because the people running it haven't heard of the phrase "sunk cost fallacy" Of the few genuinely good ideas that are produced, they are again strangled by incompetent middle management who are only interested on working on a project to get their next promotion and then quickly "moving on" (abandoning it) when they do get promoted (this seems to be one of the largest complaints from insiders at Google)
- pjmlp 4y agoSee the history of ISPC, and how it was rescued, it touches on some of those points. https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins
- lloydatkinson 4y ago> So there was #pragma simd, which sort of worked, unless you called an external function; that problem never got solved. They never understood why someone would want to write a large system that ran completely using all of the vector lanes and couldn’t imagine it was an important use case. (The attentive reader may realize that this execution model precisely describes GPUs.) Fuck, that must have been an infuriating experience dealing with the hardware team.
- tw1984 4y agowell, it turns out 4 core processors on 14nm can't keep you going forever. intel learned it the hard way.
- the_duke 4y agoCan anyone familiar with the RISC-V ecosystem chime in here? I assume Pathfinder was supposed to funnel customers to their fab business. Is there just better tooling out there so it's not really worth it, or are they giving up on their fab aspirations again already?
- klelatti 4y agoSo launched in August 22, dropped abruptly with no explanation in Jan 23 having signed up 33 ecosystem 'partners' - who have each presumably invested time, money and energy into the project. I can see Intel needs to save money but this seems pretty counterproductive. Edit - Even the (Wordpress based) website has failed now!
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThose partners probably didn't commit to funneling Intel enough fab business, so they got the axe.
- brucehoult 4y agoIt takes a lot more than 5 months using a chip development system before you're ready to send something to a fab! Like 12-18 months maybe.
- sitkack 4y agoThe Wordpress site was failing from day one, nothing has changed there. I am not sure they were that serious about Pathfinder, no energy in the room. But the other riscv vendors will certainly fill their new fab with cores. Pathfinder was just the carrot to sell other IP that they would hang off the side.
- cameron_b 4y agoI think you're right on with this. It always seemed like a way to usher in the chip production to their fab.
- atdrummond 4y agoThis is why I can never get excited about Intel doing anything outside mainline x86. Years ago, IBM and Freescale had the faith to build a community through POWER and, while not a homerun, that ecosystem still exists today (and I was able to benefit by selling hundreds of thousands/millions of devices powered by PPC/POWER). Every time I’ve tried to get excited about an Intel product line and build on it - Larrabee, Phi, Itanium - I’ve gotten massively burned. I just can’t trust them.
- eliaspro 4y agoDo we need a https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ equivalent for Intel?
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoGoogly Eyes rolling
- atdrummond 4y agoIt would probably be a much tighter circle of interested readers but the kill list is pretty long indeed. What makes me sad is not that Intel isn’t a good company - it is. It is that Intel could be an even greater company if it could just get out of its own way.
- luma 4y agoIt feels like Microsoft under Ballmer. Windows made a lot of money but the focus on it was blocking further success with the other MS properties. It took a decapitation to get them pointed in the right direction.
- chongli 4y agoAt least we got the developers dance out of the Ballmer era. What do does Intel have to show for it right now?
- dveeden2 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bul_YwczUIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bul_YwczUIg for those interested in what this is.
- klelatti 4y agoOr was!
- dveeden2 4y agoThis seems to be part of some bigger cost cutting changes https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-sunsets-network-switch-biz-kills-risc-v-pathfinder-program https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-sunsets-network-swit...
- pclmulqdq 4y agoShutting down the network switch business after eating Fulcrum and Barefoot is the bigger news here. So much money went into a pit there.
- fruffy 4y agoIt's tragic, really. Tofino chips were such a promising and impactful technology.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThe Tofino chips were amazingly programmable, and before that, the Fulcrum chips were amazingly fast. Intel got ahold of both of them, and the magic was gone.
- formerly_proven 4y agoThe latest Tofino 3 is... quite something to look at. Might actually take the cake for largest MCM and largest BGA package at over 10k pins. The POWER5 MCM is a similar size but has much fewer contacts.
- panick21_ 4y agoDamn what will happen to Oxide Computers, they relay on that. Are Tofinos still going to be produced? Edit: Seems they will support existing costumers and products. Still sad to see, lots of potential there.
- bcantrill 4y agoAs you note, Tofino 2 is still being supported: the team has been very candid and transparent with us (which we very much appreciate!) and Intel has been both formal and explicit about their ongoing support for Tofino 2. We agree with you that there is lots of potential here -- and we are not backing away from the vision of the software-driven switch (and we are pleased that Intel remains engaged with P4).
- mmargerum 4y agoIt's all about the next quarter and until that stops being true it's going to hurt U.S. competitiveness
- allenrb 4y agoAlong this line, I find their cancellation of the Oregon lab and Haifa dev center to be concerning. Sure, in the short term that stuff eats money. In the long term it means you stay relevant.
- allie1 4y agoThey haven't cancelled any of their significant capex spending - leading edge fabs in Ohio and Germany.
- Zigurd 4y agoEarly in my career I got to meet Pat Gelsinger so I know firsthand he's smart, very energetic, and he has been in IC engineering since masks were cut from Rubylith. He has all the background and knowledge to do the right things. But what I have heard so far is scattershot: Be proprietary, be open, be exclusive, be a foundry, own an ADAS company, be nowhere in cars but wish you were, etc. Totally unsurprising to find that leads to starts and stops like this one. Intel had a recipe that worked. It no longer does. Intel needs a new strategy as coherent as the old one but that fits the modern environment.
- college_physics 4y ago> Intel needs a new strategy as coherent as the old one you are assuming such as strategy exists. The future need not look like the past. In fact on pretty much all counts (geopolitics, sustainability, commoditization) the future seems to be branching unpredictably
- Zigurd 4y agoI don't assume one exists. Intel could be strategically screwed. Even if they had a hypothesis for how to create a similarly insurmountable strategy like the combination of fab capability and chip design they had before, what if the hypothesis is wrong or unimplementable?
- hasmanean 4y agoStrategy for a multibillion dollar behemoth is not the same as a strategy for a nimble startup. For years Intel provided just enough cpu power and cultivated a broad ecosystem of software developers such that any new hardware solution had to compete against the enormously more fun and flexible general purpose software solutions running on windows (and before that, dos). Custom closed source Hardware was a dead end. It either worked or it didn’t. Software could be infinitely flexible and was fast to iterate on. And every kid could train themselves to write software almost for free. This is why software ate the world. Closed source and complex compiler toolchains with hardware interfaces that require closed source drivers are practically just as inflexible as hardware. They should be avoided at all costs.
- mikerg87 4y agoI guess this kills off the "Horse Creek" partnership witrh SiFive since I if I read this thing from the summer that pathfinder was the dev kit for a lot of this. Sigh. Just when I thought Intel was getting better...
- sylware 4y agoSo? Are they(and/or their owners) quitting RISC-V "board"?
- onepointsixC 4y agoThis is not good. Intel needs to be doubling down on R&D, new products and services. I'm extremely disappointed in Pat Gelsinger here. He's committing to growing a dividend while free cash flow is negative, while cutting jobs and important R&D. Pat needs to cut the dividend and use that to invest in the future of the company.
- jbirer 4y agoI think Intel realized that RISC-V is at the point where it's not just a pet project that can become a subdiary, but an actual threat
- badintel 4y agoNoooooooooooooooooooo I was looking for more competition in the market for overpriced, severely underpowered SBCs for outdated architectures.