Barely six months after its launch, Intel has put an end to its RISC-V Pathfinder program, an initiative that consisted of a development environment designed to encourage the use of open source RISC-V CPU designs. Its launch was announced last August, in which Vijay Krishnanso he Head of Intel’s RISC-V Venturesnoted that with Pathfinder, users could “test pre-build concepts on Intel FPGAs or virtual simulators«.
Intel pointed out that this service was «scalable, from home users and those in academic and research environments, to large-scale commercial projects«. A little over a month ago, on December 1, Intel confirmed that it was going to make several improvements to Pathfinder, which in fact should be about to arrive. In the announcement of these improvements, Krishnan kept appearing. But when you open the Pathfinder website for a few days you can see that the program has come to an end.
On the page now Intel informs that unfortunately, Intel is not going to continue with the Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V program, which they have decided to close with immediate effect. In addition, since they are not going to offer more releases or fix more bugs, they encourage those who used the development environment to start using third-party RISC-V software development tools.
As for Krishnan, on his LinkedIn profile it can be seen that his position as head of RISC-V at Intel ends in January 2023, and that he is looking for a new job destination. For now, Intel has not issued any statement or informed about the end of the program, nor about its reasons.
It is a strange decision, since according to what they remember in The Register, the program had a fund of 1,000 million dollars for the development of RISC-V, had joined the RISC-V International consortium and promised to make significant contributions to the architecture evolution.
In view of the situation of the company, one of the most logical explanations for Intel to have made this decision is in your financial situation. Last week, the company reported its results for the final quarter of 2022, which showed a sharp and steep decline in revenue for the company, as well as rather bleak forecasts for the current quarter.
Despite being done with the show, he considers the rise of «ARM and RISC-V based products for specific workloads in data centers» is among its main threats, along with its main competitors, which are AMD and Nvidia. Therefore, killing the Pathfinder program means that Intel has one less tool to attract RISC-V developers.
