The announcement is seen as highlighting Intel’s strategic investment in open collaboration and support of the open RISC-V architecture and highlights the numerous deep RISC-V member partnerships that currently exist with Intel.
Bob Brennan, Vice President of Customer Solutions Engineering for Intel Foundry Services, will be joining both the RISC-V Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee.
The RISC-V ecosystem provides open modular building blocks for modern computing. In joining RISC-V, Intel will have a leading role in helping to expand the RISC-V ecosystem. RISC-V’s open collaboration model, combined with freedom of design across domains and industries, facilitates technology innovation for the hardware community and RISC-V members. Intel’s planned investments and commitment to open collaboration on RISC-V will help to strengthen the overall ecosystem and drive the commercialisation of RISC-V.
Commenting Brennan said, “A rich open-source software and hardware ecosystem is critical for accelerating the growth and adoption of RISC-V and fully unlocking value for chip designers. Intel is delighted to support the growth of the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture. We look forward to optimizing IP for Intel process technologies to ensure that RISC-V runs best on IFS silicon across all types of cores, from embedded to high-performance.”
Intel’s growing investment in RISC-V will enable acceleration of the development of open RISC-V IP and the company has already announced several immediate RISC-V community benefits led by Intel Foundry Services (IFS).
IFS will sponsor an open-source software development platform that allows for freedom in experimentation, including partners across the ecosystem, universities, and consortia. IFS is the only foundry to offer IP optimised for all three of the industry’s leading ISAs: x86, Arm and RISC-V.
According to Intel it has already seen strong demand from foundry customers to support more RISC-V IP offerings.
“Intel has been a leader in microprocessor innovation for decades and these announcements signal the recognition that massive investment in open source has the power to change the course of history,” said Calista Redmond, CEO, RISC-V International. “Open collaboration in RISC-V has already ignited a profound shift in the semiconductor industry, and this partnership will accelerate innovation in open computing. RISC-V welcomes Intel and looks forward to our collective expansion and the commercial adoption of RISC-V across compute workloads and industries, growing RISC-V everywhere.”
