Intel invests $1 billion in RISC-V

Intel is investing $1 billion to partner with other companies and start-ups to accelerate the adoption of RISC-V. The chip group is working together with, among others, Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies and SiFive.

The investment of EUR 880 million comes from Intel Capital and Intel Foundry Services and is intended to ensure that Intel gains market share in the production of chips based on the main instruction set architectures: x86, ARM and RISC-V. That commitment is part of Intel’s IDM 2.0 strategy, which the company presented a year ago. Its purpose is to produce chips for third parties and thus compete with Samsung and TSMC. Intel is investing billions of dollars in expanding its chip production to make that possible.

RISC-V is an open source ISA that is growing in popularity. Intel hopes to continue to grow the ecosystem and benefit from its popularity by investing early in start-ups and growing companies that are doing this. Intel points out, among other things, the use of RISC-V chiplets on packages, which can then be combined with Xeon cores and where the connection goes via interconnects developed by Intel.

Intel is happy to work with companies to develop an open standard for these types of die-to-die interconnects on a package. One of the companies Intel is partnering with for its RISC-V initiative is SiFive. Last year there were rumors that Intel wanted to acquire this company. Learn more about RISC-V in The Rise of RISC-VPlus – Towards Open Source Processors.