There is nothing more important and less accessible to any business than Intel’s x86 technology and licenses. Opening FABs up to third parties to design their chips will go hand in hand with licensing the x86 architecture of their cores, without exception, in possibly the biggest industry turnaround in over 20 years.
Intel, the license, its technology and its CPUs
In fact, the announcement is of such caliber that Intel has come to explain it publicly when it is something that should be private for its current and future customers. In the voice of Bob Brennan, vice president of customer solutions engineering, he puts it simply:
“We have what we call a multi-ISA strategy. This is the first time in Intel’s history that we will license x86 Flex Cores and Hard Cores to customers who want to develop chips.”
Here we must understand what Intel calls Flexible Core and Hard Core, where the first is understood from the capacity of programmable logic such as FPGAs, while the second is the essential part of Intel technology that will go inside the custom chip. This is focused so that customers can design prototypes with Flexible Cores (also called Soft or Soft) while when you want to go to production then it is already implemented and changes to Hard Cores (or Hard)
Production and the paradigm with ARM and RISC-V
Why is Intel now opening and offering its most precious treasure to everyone? There are three main strategic reasons. The first is to stop ARM thanks to its low-power Gracemont cores, where Intel is far superior in IPC and now manufacturers can make use of them for their chips.
Second, there are ulterior motives referencing AMD and TSMC. With the first, it is ensured that it enters to compete in quite interesting scenarios such as consoles or smartphones (Exynos 2200 for example with RDNA 2 and ARM). It competes with the second in chip business volume since it has already launched the strategy of $20 billion to create the new FABs in Ohio to 2025.
The dimension and volume is such in them that it is only understood by this opening of licenses where Intel hopes to attract so many companies that it would have to expand said FAB to 100,000 million in just a decade. The bet is not only innovative, it is risky to a great extent.
Together, but not mixed: integration in chiplets
We do not yet know the details of the licenses and how they will be done, but we do know that Intel will allow its cores to be included in chips that integrate ARM or RISC-V Cores, where they will all work in unison, but in different chiplets. Brennan sheds some light here:
“We haven’t fully fleshed out our strategy, but the concept is similar in that we want to enable the IP ecosystem around our products.”
These statements seem to be focused on the idea stated above: Intel offers its licenses, the designer chooses the type of core and ISA to create a compatible x86 chip, and once the system is validated, Intel uses its facilities to manufacture it under its state-of-the-art lithographic processes. or more mature, as the client wishes.
It’s a different approach than ARM and AMD, where they design the chips together with the customer to meet their needs and then send the design to a manufacturer like TSMC. The first major customer will be Qualcomm, which will benefit from the more than $1 billion that Intel has put as a fund of innovation and design to overcome the challenges of x86, ARM and RISC-V in a single package. As we say, a proposal as innovative as it is risky that can change the course of the industry and how we conceive chips today.
