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Today, Intel released two big news:
1、
February 15 news, according to foreign media Theregister reported that in order to develop the wafer foundry business, Intel will license its most important asset x86 architecture to customers who want to manufacture custom chips.
This will make it possible that x86, Arm, and RISC-V cores will work together in a single processor.
2、
Intel has just announced the acquisition of a wafer foundry, Tower Semiconductor, worth more than $5.4 billion, at a cash price of $53 per share, and the seventh largest foundry in the world, which will strengthen the manufacturing capacity, global layout and technology portfolio in the company's IDM 2.0 strategy to meet unprecedented industry demand.
Intel CEO Pat Kissinger said, "Tower Semiconductor's technical portfolio, geographic reach, deep customer relationships and service-oriented business philosophy will help expand Intel's foundry services and advance Intel's goal of becoming a major global supplier of foundry capacity."
For the first time in history, x86 softcore and hardcore were opened
Bob Brennan, vice president of customer solution engineering for Intel's wafer foundry services, told reporters: "We have a strategy that we call multi-ISA. This is the first time in Intel's history that x86 soft and hard cores have been licensed to customers who want to develop chips. ”。
A soft core is a CPU core that can be implemented in programmable logic (such as an FPGA) or in an application-specific chip being designed, while a hard core is a black box design placed in a custom chip. Simply put, softcore is useful for prototyping and special cases, while hardcore is most useful when you want to manufacture production-grade parts.
This is the first time in Intel's history that it has licensed the x86 soft and hard cores to customers who want to develop chips
Licensing the x86 core is part of a broader strategy to help customers build computing chips that keep Intel's assembly line busy. Intel recently pledged to open a $20 billion plant near Columbus, Ohio, by 2025 and is expanding fab capacity in the U.S. and Ireland.
It's unclear which Intel x86 cores will be licensed, how, and what level of customization customers can make. Arm licenses design drawings for CPUs, GPUs, and accelerated cores to chip designers, and licenses architecture to large customers such as Apple, allowing them to design their own Arm-compatible cores. The latter is Apple's way of designing its own M1 Arm-compatible silicon chips for the latest generation of Mac computers, as well as designing system-on-chips for the iPhone and iPad.
Intel: Lego-like chip manufacturing method
Intel is taking a LEGO brick-like approach to chip manufacturing, where customers can create custom processors based on application requirements by mixing and matching Arm and RISC-V cores with licensed x86 cores. Cores based on different architectures will be interconnected and work together to execute system software and programs. It looks like the cores will be grouped onto chips: these are small electrically connected chips arranged in a processor package. For example, an x86 core can be mounted on one chip, arm can be mounted on another, and RISC-V can be mounted on another chip.
In the chip chassis, we expect arm and RISC-V to have demand, depending on which customer it is, and will support both products
Brennan provides an example: Customers will be able to build chips using licensed Xeon cores and match them to AI accelerators based on the RISC-V specification or Arm IP. Intel has also created a chassis called a chipset, in which chips from the x86, Arm, and RISC-V cores can be assembled together to form a coherent chip.
"On the chip chassis side, we expect arm and RISC-V to have demand, depending on which customer it is and will support both products," Brennan said, adding: "We haven't fully developed our strategy yet, but the concept is similar and we want to implement the IP ecosystem around our products." ”
In other words, Intel's licensing of x86 may be different from how Arm and other companies license their CPU core designs, in which Arm provides blueprints to customers, who arrange the design as needed, and then send it to someone else for manufacturing. Instead, it sounds more like Intel is allowing chip architects to pick the core and acceleration engines they want, including x86 and others, that they want to leverage Intel's manufacturing facilities and proprietary technology to create their own highly customized x86-compatible components.
In this way, we can see the rise of Xeon-powered processors whose features are not common in Intel's official Xeon product line.
Intel hopes that licensing x86 and allowing it to coexist with Arm and RISC-V will inspire innovation in chip design and create preferences for its wafer and packaging technologies, thereby maintaining demand for its factories.
With the acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, Intel wanted to grow the wafer and packaging business
"Broadly speaking, this is to grow our wafer and packaging business because IFS (Intel Foundry Services) is striving to be one of the best foundries in the world," Brennan said. ”。
Brennan did not say whether the chip chassis designs could be transferred to rival factories such as TSMC. Intel has packaging technologies unique to its factory, including Coveros, which allows stacking compute blocks and EMIBs (Embedded Multichip Interconnect Bridges), emibs that allow high-speed communication between multiple chips within a single package.
Today, Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) and Tower Semiconductor (NASDAQ: TSEM), a leading foundry for analog semiconductor solutions, announced a final agreement. Under the agreement, Intel will acquire Tower Semiconductor for $53 per share in cash, with a total corporate value of approximately $5.4 billion. This acquisition is a major advance in Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy, further expanding Intel's manufacturing capacity, global footprint, and technology portfolio to meet unprecedented industry demands.
To sum up, today Intel announced two big news, the acquisition of Towersemi + open X86 architecture, fully built the IDM 2.0 era.
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