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Comment by spiralpolitik | Hacker News Reader

Huge world-view shift from Intel. Likely the precursor to splitting the fab part of Intel from the design part with the intention of spinning one or the other off.

It also underscores the reality that Intel doesn't think it can keep its fabs busy/profitable with just its own designs anymore.

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> Intel doesn't think it can keep its fabs busy/profitable with just its own designs anymore

Intel has been saying so for the last 2-3 years.

Much longer. At least since 2014.

https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-...

Not super unexpected though. Pat Gelsinger has been teasing this move[0] for as long as he's been CEO, and it makes sense. The industry is verging on RISC again, and Intel does have meaningful knowledge they can apply here. If their business model is right, it could be a profitable side pot.

Honestly, this says less about Intel's desperation to me and more about ARM's. Just a few months ago they were rushing to renegotiate their contracts, and there have been rumblings for a while about ARM's eventual response to RISC-V. They know they need buy-in from legacy companies to make ARM a lasting ISA, simply trusting Apple not to throw them under the bus will get them PowerPC'd in an instant.

[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/677947/intels-ceo-wants-app...

Now that you mention RISC-V, maybe a bolder move from Intel would have been to throw their weight behind RISC-V and try to be the leader of the new tech instead of a co-leader of the old tech.

On the other hand, ARM is very popular right now, and maybe Intel feels like what it needs right now is to take some of that market to deprive competing fabs of revenue and give itself better economies of scale.

>a bolder move from Intel would have been to throw their weight behind RISC-V

Intel axed their involvement with RISC-V.[1]

[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/30/intel_ris_v_pathfinde...

They will still release some devboard with chips co-designed with SiFive, and offer their foundries to clients who want to fab chips based on RISC-V.

Just not under the Pathfinder program.

That was just one part of their involvement.

Couldn’t disagree more with your second paragraph. Customers making SoCs with Arm CPUs can happily go to TSMC. Intel is desperate to get IFS working and if it hasn’t got an Arm offering it’s basically locked out of mobile SoCs.

Also Apple is a very small part of Arm’s business.

Apple is a fraction of ARM's current business, but represents the entirety of their future. The microcontroller licensing business is pretty much over (not that ARM China refuted that), so their money will be on licensing core design and the ISA to mid-high range SOCs. RISC-V won't be there for a while, but it's already starting to replace STM32s in devices that only need simple digital controllers.

The writing is on the wall - RISC will be democratized, and ARM's intellectual property is bleeding value by the day. They know this, and they're making good moves to secure their positioning by working with Intel. Even still, their stakeholders are getting iffy and even their largest customers don't see them as essential to their business. Hundreds of Chinese manufacturers already kicked them to the curb years ago.

> Intel is desperate to get IFS working and if it hasn’t got an Arm offering it’s basically locked out of mobile SoCs.

Or, less charitably, ARM is getting iffy about TSMC's density roadmap and wants to hedge their bet a little. They lose nothing by reaching out to Intel, and Intel loses nothing by expanding their lithography to 2 popular ISAs. It is a mutual moneymaking move, and one that would not exist if ARM corporate was confident in their ability to wait-out Intel in the long term.

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