Intel (INTC-US) In order to implement the IDM 2.0 development strategy, it has recently made frequent moves in investment and mergers and acquisitions, in addition to imitating TSMC (2330-TW)(TSM-US) In addition to building its own ecosystem and expanding the use of RISC-V, it also opened the X86 architecture for the first time. In the future, customers will be able to enjoy the combination of X86, Arm and RISC-V IP ecosystems at the same time; Assets—X86 architecture authorization can be said to be a major killer for Intel to expand its foundry business.
From the perspective of the current three major IP architectures, Intel’s X86 architecture has decades of history and is powerful, but it consumes too much power. It is still the leader in the PC CPU market; RISC-V only appeared ten years ago, and the instruction set is relatively simplified. , the size of the chip used is usually small, and it has made a way in the embedded and IoT market; the ARM architecture has decades of customer feedback, continuous improvement and evolution, and has a major advantage in the smartphone chip market .
Following Intel’s previous announcement of a comprehensive ecosystem alliance and commitment to expanding the use of RISC-V architecture, Bob Brennan, vice president of IFS customer solutions engineering, recently revealed that it will open X86 soft core or hardware for the first time. The core is licensed to customers who want to develop chips, which can be used to attract customers who want to build multi-ISA (instruction set architecture) chips.
In the past, Intel was quite insistent on the X86 architecture priority strategy, and was hostile to other non-X86 architectures. The open architecture this time exceeded market expectations and also showed that Intel has made a big concession to expand its foundry business.
With the continuous advancement of new technologies, the chip architecture becomes more and more complex, and the degree of IP integration affects the willingness of IC design factories to put into production. After Intel promotes the multi-ISA strategy, it means that customers who put in chips in Intel in the future will be able to enjoy the three major IP architectures at the same time. Serve.
In recent years, Apple has expanded its self-developed chips. TSMC has used the ARM architecture and advanced manufacturing process as a foundry. The cooperation between TSMC and ARM has continued to siege the city and plunder the underground. It also endangered the position of Intel’s x86 architecture. In order to regain market dominance, combined with the other two major IP architectures , has also become a major strategy for Intel to reverse the situation.
As a pure wafer foundry, TSMC does not compete with customers, so it can fully gain customer trust and have closer cooperation. Intel, as an IDM factory, has conflicts of interest with some potential customers, but this open architecture is quite It means announcing the opening of manufacturing and expanding cooperation with chip factories, so as to take advantage of the existing advantages to compete with TSMC in the fierce competition of advanced wafer foundry processes.
