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Intel Foundry Services and Arm announce collaboration on SoC design
- meragrin_ 4y agoIntel Foundry Services (IFS) specifically.
- mepian 4y agoThe original title says "Intel Foundry" but I had to make it fit into HN's character limit.
- neogodless 4y agoI might have abbreviated "Collab" instead.
- primer42 4y agoAhhh another example of the hardest problem in CS - naming things!
- bee_rider 4y agoI wonder if this can be solved by coming up with the acronym you want (because let’s be honest, the clever acronym is what matters) and asking ChatGPT to work out what it means.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoIt's solved by asking Dang for a charitable exception
- Rexogamer 4y ago"Intel Foundry Services and Arm to collaborate on SoC design?"
- mepian 4y agoI can't edit the parent comment anymore so just for the context, my original title was "Intel and Arm Announce Multigeneration Collaboration on Leading-Edge SoC Design" and someone changed it to the current title.
- trustingtrust 4y agoI wonder how this affects TSMCs business in the long run and if this is a move that is specifically geared towards foundries to come under US ownership. Interesting regardless.
- scarface74 4y agoIntel’s first announced partnership to be a third party fab is to manufacture chips based on processes that were state of the art in 2013. TSMC doesn’t have much to fear in the near future. Edit: I see where the confusion lies. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/08/10/intel-foundry-services-announces-mediatek-as-first-wafer-customer/?sh=721b210f464a https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/08/10/inte... This was announced two years ago. Intel hasn’t proven that it can be a third party manufacturer for anything close to cutting edge Intel announced they would be producing chips for MediaTek two years ago.
- pedrocr 4y agoAre you perhaps confusing 18A with 18nm? 18A is 1.8nm and is scheduled for the second half of 2024.
- sct202 4y agoThey're referencing the first round of IFS which launched in 2013 and never really became much of anything but had a lot of announcements and fanfare at the time. Their foundry would have been the most advanced available foundry processes at the time had it launched as planned. From Feb 2013: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-altera-intel-manufacturing/intel-takes-big-step-in-chip-foundry-business-idUSBRE91O16G20130226 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-altera-intel-manufacturin...
- scarface74 4y agoActually I was referencing the MediaTek announcement https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/08/10/intel-foundry-services-announces-mediatek-as-first-wafer-customer/?sh=721b210f464a https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2022/08/10/inte...
- Maursault 4y agoGlad to hear Leading Edge is back in the game![1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_Edge_Products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_Edge_Products
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoInteresting to see Intel (or atleast a part of Intel) 'working with' a competitor. Although this might help Intel become more of a foundry player like TSMC this could help ARM get a greater share of the the server market over Intels xeon processors.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- klelatti 4y agoThis seems absolutely inevitable. If IFS is serious it needs to be fabbing SoC's with Arm CPUs and to be as competitive as possible with TSMC. Nothing forces IFS to make Arm CPU's that compete with Intel's desktop and server products. Of course, the two companies have a long history of collaboration including Intel having an Arm architecture license via StrongARM. There is an interesting anecdote from Robin Saxby of Arm about when Steve Jobs phoned him and tried to persuade him to block the sale of StrongARM to Intel but Saxby convinced Jobs otherwise.
- hashtag-til 4y agoThis is the definitive comment in this thread ^.
- pavlov 4y agoIntel sold off Xscale (née StrongARM) just before the touchscreen smartphone boom started. Seems like they would have been well positioned to take the lead in this market. Probably Apple would have used an Xscale SOC for the iPhone if Intel had taken it seriously. Strategic blunder of the century so far?
- baybal2 4y agoNon-touchscreen smartphone boom been going for years prior. The problem was that embedded OS-es like Symbian, A200, PalmOS were running circles around Windows Mobile. Most of them used Samsung SoCs which were few times slower than StrongARM. StrongARM was seen exclusively in the context of it being used to "lift" extremely bloated WinMo smartphones, and was otherwise thought as an overkill for other uses.
- baq 4y agoThe biggest mistake of Paul Ottelini for sure. The world would look very, very different if he said yes.
- lr1970 4y agoBefore becoming Intel's CEO Paul Otellini served as executive VP of sales and marketing. This uber-blunder is a great example what happens when you let a "bean-counter" run a tech company. EDIT: corrected factual error. Paul was never a CFO but much of his career was in sales and marketing. Sales do count as "bean-counters" because their main metric are counting PaL.
- DeathArrow 4y agoSo Intel might use TSMC's better process for some of its own CPUs while fabbing ARM CPUs in its foundries?
- sharedbeans 4y agoThese are processes several years down the line. Intel is saying their processes will be competitive at that point.
- mnau 4y agoI hope they can make money from IFS, because based on Intels lastest earnings, they can't even make money on their own designs made in their own fabs.
- spiralpolitik 4y agoHuge world-view shift from Intel. Likely the precursor to splitting the fab part of Intel from the design part with the intention of spinning one or the other off. It also underscores the reality that Intel doesn't think it can keep its fabs busy/profitable with just its own designs anymore.
- belval 4y ago> Intel doesn't think it can keep its fabs busy/profitable with just its own designs anymore Intel has been saying so for the last 2-3 years.
- bgorman 4y agoMuch longer. At least since 2014. https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-intel-discontinues-the-custom-foundry-business/ https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-...
- smoldesu 4y agoNot super unexpected though. Pat Gelsinger has been teasing this move[0] for as long as he's been CEO, and it makes sense. The industry is verging on RISC again, and Intel does have meaningful knowledge they can apply here. If their business model is right, it could be a profitable side pot. Honestly, this says less about Intel's desperation to me and more about ARM's. Just a few months ago they were rushing to renegotiate their contracts, and there have been rumblings for a while about ARM's eventual response to RISC-V. They know they need buy-in from legacy companies to make ARM a lasting ISA, simply trusting Apple not to throw them under the bus will get them PowerPC'd in an instant. [0] https://www.macworld.com/article/677947/intels-ceo-wants-apple-back-as-a-customer.html https://www.macworld.com/article/677947/intels-ceo-wants-app...
- adrianmonk 4y agoNow that you mention RISC-V, maybe a bolder move from Intel would have been to throw their weight behind RISC-V and try to be the leader of the new tech instead of a co-leader of the old tech. On the other hand, ARM is very popular right now, and maybe Intel feels like what it needs right now is to take some of that market to deprive competing fabs of revenue and give itself better economies of scale.
- vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago[dead]
- tgtweak 4y agoGlad that Pat is making good on his strategy to offer IFS to everyone, even bleeding edge process nodes. I really think this is the only way to truly mitigate the dependance on fabs that are entirely in the East China Sea region. If Intel can ensure that IP is safe between IFS and a potential competitor to Intel, then I think this is all for the better.
- phendrenad2 4y agoSo what does this mean for RISC-V?
- snvzz 4y agoNot much. All we've learned here is that Intel foundry will fab some ARM chips.
- HPsquared 4y ago"Competition is for losers"
- lizknope 4y agoI read the press release twice and it doesn't really say much. I'm a digital physical design engineer. What it probably means is that ARM will port their standard cells and memory compiler to Intel's process. The other IP like the ARM CPU's are delivered as Verilog RTL and a customer can synthesize them to standard cells using any foundry's standard cell library. When I worked at ARM they would work with any foundry even those that made competing IP. If my fabless semiconductor company decided to use Intel as our fab then we would still be using ARM CPUs in our chips. We aren't going to use Intel though based on Intel's prior history over the last 20 years of saying they will be a fab to external customers and then backing away and cancelling those plans. Based on talking to former coworkers most of the people talking to Intel as a fab are using it to negotiate lower prices with TSMC or Samsung.
- noipv4 4y agoBack to Intel StrongARM Pocket PC PDAs?