RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organisation announced that Intel Corporation has partnered RISC-V at the Premier membership level.
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 to open collaboration on RISC-V is said to strengthen the overall ecosystem and drive commercialisation of RISC-V.
“Intel is pleased to join the community in RISC-V International,” said Bob Brennan, vp of Customer Solutions Engineering for Intel Foundry Services. “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 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. The IFS strategy will provide a broad range of leadership intellectual property (IP) optimised for Intel process technologies. IFS is the only foundry to offer IP optimized for all three of the industry’s leading ISAs: x86, Arm and RISC-V. Intel has already seen strong demand from foundry customers to support more RISC-V IP offerings, the company said in a press release.
“The dependencies between software and hardware have become more intertwined,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation. “Recent decades have shown us how investment in open technology stacks and collaboration with a community creates tremendous value for everyone involved. Intel’s investment in an open source software development platform for RISC-V will contribute to this trend, creating a paradigm shift in the open source ecosystem.”
Intel has also indicated support of the RISC-V ecosystem through collaboration on technology co-optimisation, prioritising wafer shuttles, supporting customer designs, building development boards and software infrastructure, and more.
