Intel Corporation Makes Deep Investment in RISC-V Community

riscv.org

37 points·jdblair··5 comments

RISC-V is a competitor to Intel. If successful RISC-V threatens to not only take market share from Intel, but turn the entire market away from proprietary CPU's that are Intel's bread and butter.

In what world does it make any competitive sense for Intel to help RISC-V?

Maybe Intel's only giving them resources to get their staff onto committees, and then plotting to have those committee members sabotage the project from within?

The investment is to make the RISC-V CPUs in Intel foundries. It's actually quite in line with Intel's current strategy of opening their fabs to external CPU designers.

As for the "threat" of RISC-V to Intel, I don't think it's quite as big as the ARM one so they might want to boost RISC-V in an attempt to fragment the mobile market where ARM is king.

> RISC-V is a competitor to Intel. If successful RISC-V threatens to not only take market share from Intel, but turn the entire market away from proprietary CPU's that are Intel's bread and butter.

No, RISC-V is not a competitor of Intel. RISC-V is a competitor of x86.

RISC-V is an ISA while Intel is a company. Intel could sell RISC-V processors if it had to. And maybe they will in the future? So it's not really a threat to Intel CPU market.

And no, RISC-V is not a free and open-source CPU, RISC-V is a royalty-free and open-source ISA. So the market is not turning away from proprietary CPUs. But maybe it turns towards proprietary CPUs that implement an opensource ISA.

Given Intel past treatment of their tech we can look forward to the architecture getting locked down with binary blobs and things like the ME processor. No thanks.

"Fear the greeks when they bring you presents."

I hope this architecture does not get destroyed by Intel, like they did with MIPS, HP-PA and Alpha.

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