Much like IBM after the PC architecture ran away from it and almost collapsed Big Blue’s highly profitable minicomputer and mainframe businesses, Intel has been through some soul-searching in the wake of Arm’s expansion from the world of cellular phones into just about everything else.
Intel has moved from a company that sued relentlessly to try to maintain control of the instruction set architecture (ISA) that powered the PCs that crippled IBM’s original business to one that now sees or at least claims to see the advantages in an ISA that anyone can use to build their own processors. Intel is now one of RISC-V’s biggest fans, launching this week a programme to try to get more chip designers onboard with the architecture.
At the RISC-V Spring Week back in May, Gary Martz, senior director of Intel Foundry Services, claimed, “Meeting the needs of the growing RISC-V community is one of our key objectives. We share the same vision that a free and open ISA...