The high prosperity of the semiconductor industry has raised the status of chip foundries to a new height. Technology is the future, in order to maintain their competitive advantage in the future intelligent information market, the United States semiconductors regardless of the means to regulate the chip market, so that it is conducive to the direction of their own semiconductor companies. Intel is the "core chess piece" of the United States to implement technology monopoly and market control in the semiconductor field.
In fact, with regard to Intel Core, the United States has been laying the groundwork since 2020 and creating all the favorable factors for Intel. For example, TSMC and Samsung were invited to the United States to build factories and transfer some advanced foundry technology, and spent $52 billion to promote the return of their own semiconductor supply chain, creating a stable and well-built chip foundry environment for Intel. With the intervention of American semiconductors, ASML's new lithography machine was also the first to be handed over to Intel. The purpose is to allow Intel to help the United States regain its former glory in the field of chip foundry.
In order to maintain its advantages in the semiconductor field, the United States also blocks and restricts the enterprises that threaten it in the semiconductor field. Domestic companies such as Huawei and SMIC have almost all suffered from the barbaric means of American semiconductors. However, what the United States did not expect was that a recent move by Intel has helped domestic semiconductors one step.
On February 8, 2022, Intel announced that the company has prepared a sizable fund that will help chip companies build disruptive technologies with Intel Foundry Services (IFS). What does that mean? To put it simply, Intel will use this part of the money to attract more chip companies to join its own camp, using Intel's latest innovative chip architecture and advanced packaging technology to promote customer products to enter the market. Intel can also profit from it, improve the scope of business impact and technology influence, and competitiveness.
Regarding Intel's decision, some experts believe that Intel is courting the wafer foundry service. Because Intel's wafer foundry services are not too picky about the architecture, not only support RISC-V, Arm, X86, but also support hybrid chips like X86+Arm. It is worth mentioning that Intel is also declaring war on TSMC in doing so.
When it comes to the RISC-V architecture, I believe everyone has heard of it to a greater or lesser extent. The advantages of free and open source, high flexibility and low power consumption make the RISC-V architecture a "fragrant feast" for domestic chip manufacturers, the most representative of which is Alibaba's flathead brother. With the help of RISC-V architecture, Pingtou Brother has listed dozens of processor chips. This time, Intel vigorously supports the RISC-V architecture and announces its participation in the RISC-V International Council, which will promote the ecological development of RISC-V and improve the compatibility and matching degree of the RISC-V instruction set architecture for software and hardware, which is also a problem that domestic businessmen have been considering. Therefore, while Intel supports the RISC-V architecture, it also invisibly helps domestic semiconductor manufacturers.
Of course, the purpose of Intel's support for RISC-V architecture is to improve its competitiveness in the chip market, after all, the chip processor represented by the X86 architecture has a high power consumption that is not suitable for the development of future mobile smart devices. And for domestic enterprises, in order to achieve the goal of self-sufficiency in the core technology of logic chip design, relying on THE RISC-V architecture is not feasible. Even though RISC-V has no copyright restrictions, the limitations of being part of a thin instruction set make the RISC-V architecture unable to meet the needs of high-performance processor chips.
It is better to seek people than to seek oneself, and having its own core technology is the premise for maintaining the sustainable development of the semiconductor industry. It is worth mentioning that regarding the instruction set architecture, China's Loongson Zhongke launched the CISC complex instruction set system "loong Arch instruction set architecture". However, compared with the mature X86 and Arm architectures, loong Arch still needs a long time to improve.
What do you want to say about Intel's $1 billion investment in the RISC-V instruction set architecture? Welcome to leave a message and comment below. I am Berber Said Technology, a veteran semiconductor technology enthusiast. Follow me to take you to learn more about the latest semiconductor information and learn more useful semiconductor knowledge.