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Intel has some big plans that could shake up the CPU industry as we know it
Intel is making some big changes. In addition to the massive capital investment, the company is making some changes to its core business model. Intel increasingly sees itself not just as a technology maker, but as a provider of third-party foundry services. Some of its ideas could really shake up the traditional CPU market.
Bob Brennan, vice president of customer solutions engineering at Intel Foundry Services, register.
Intel will design custom CPUs for its customers, allowing its core x86 architecture to be integrated with optional ARM and RISC-V CPU cores and even other IP. We know it spent billions of dollars to expand its production capacity, and it would be better for Intel to have these customer orders run 24/7.
We call Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake a hybrid architecture, which is the most accurate description. It’s one thing to include cores of substantially similar size, but quite another to include chiplets that contain completely different instruction sets.
“Broadly speaking, this is about growing our wafer and packaging business into an IFS [Intel Foundry Services] We are striving to become a world-class foundry. It shows how committed Intel is to growing the foundry business with all these different ISAs going forward,” Brennan said.
For decades, the x86 architecture was licensed to only a few companies. Intel itself and AMD are by far the most widely known. While VIA has had some success over the past few years, x86 is essentially the domain of two giants. This may be about to change, as Intel is reportedly willing to license the x86 architecture to other companies.
Details appear to be lacking, at least publicly, but it’s another indicator of Intel’s planned transition to a more hybrid business model. Seeing that TSMC makes billions, it’s not hard to imagine why.
It remains to be seen what form this hybrid CPU could take. This kind of stuff is likely to be highly application specific to begin with, probably in the enterprise space. But there are also gaming possibilities. The way a GPU integrates dedicated ray tracing capabilities or AI cores can give us an idea of what to expect.
x86 is an ancient architecture, which means it has a lot of legacy features that were rarely used over the past few decades. Under certain gaming loads, efficient ARM or RISC cores may be more power efficient.
Technology is always evolving, and PC gaming is a big factor in that. In the next few years, CPUs as we know them may look completely different than they do now.