Intel has seen many setbacks in recent years and has lost quite a bit of its market share. Its fabrication processes have seen considerable set back in its chipset timeline. This severely hampered the company’s ability to deliver chips that can deliver a combination of power and efficiency, especially in laptops.
The biggest blow to the company came when Apple decided to abandon Intel and adopt its own home-developed custom Arm-based chip designs. Intel once had a chance to establish its dominance in the Arm-based SoC market as well, as it once owned XScale, which made Arm-based SoCs that once powered the Pocket PCs and PDAs. However, Intel sold its XScale business in 2006, the year before Apple launched the iPhone and paved the way for Arm-based chips to dominate the mobile market.
And when the company launched its x86-based Atom competitors, they were simply no match for the more efficient RISC architecture underpinning Arm-based designs. But, rumours indicate that Intel is now investigating a possible ‘Plan B’ in a new partnership between it and RISC-V fabless chip designer SiFive.
According to sources, this new partnership will see Intel license SiFive’s IP to create its own SiFive P550-based 64-bit SoC that it will fabricate on its new 7 nm node. This fabrication will help form the basis of a new development platform called the Horse Creek, and Intel announced that it would be made available to customers interested in exploring various applications involving embedded SoC tech.
And the technology is not limited to smartphones, but also cars, IoT products, and the like. For now, the company has not revealed the technical specifications of the SoC, so there is still a doubt as to whether it will be a single-core or multi-core platform. Again, the GPU platform is also still unknown; however, it’s rumoured to be the Xe platform.
