Is Intel going up against Arm?

In June 2020, Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference that it had broken up with Intel, its old partner of 15 years, and that it would install its self-developed chips with the ARM instruction set on its Mac series products to completely connect the underlying computing architecture of mobile and PC terminals.

As the PC era fades away, Intel seems to be at a loss in the mobile Internet sector and is losing ground in the competition for the mobile Internet chip market.

Although Intel started developing low-energy Atom processor chips as early as 2004, it has not been able to catch up with the fast train of mobile devices. In the past decade, Intel has invested heavily in Atom processor chips, launching the SoFIA chipset for affordable mobile phones in emerging markets and the Broxton chipset mainly for high-end mobile phones. However, due to unclear market positioning, unresolved high energy consumption problems, inadequate baseband technology and other reasons, the Atom series of products have been wandering between mobile phones, tablets and low-cost PCs, and have never been able to carve out a niche. In 2019, Intel sold its 5G business to Apple and completely withdrew from the mobile baseband market.

Even more cruelly, the PC market share has continued to shrink, while the territory of mobile Internet chips has continued to expand. The market base that supports Intel's rapid growth has changed, and Intel has fallen into an awkward situation.

At the same time, Arm is taking advantage of the mobile Internet era. The mobile terminal market is active, and Arm is developing more smoothly. In the fourth quarter of 2020 alone, the global shipment of chips based on Arm IP reached a record 6.7 billion, surpassing the total shipment of other architecture chips such as X86, ARC, Power and MIPS.

As of February 2021, Arm partners have delivered more than 180 billion chips based on Arm IP . Arm's IP has a very strong leverage effect, with nearly $2 billion in revenue a year, leveraging the global chip design industry value of more than $100 billion.

Although Intel's x86 has a solid position in the PC field, it has no way to curb Arm's growth.

Number of chips using Arm IP (Source: Arm official website)

"Microsoft + Intel" defined the PC era, and "Arm + Android" defined the smartphone era. In the era of the Internet of Things, new architectures are needed to adapt to vertical segments. RISC-V is likely to develop into one of the world's mainstream CPUs, thus forming a three-way split between x86, Arm, and RISC-V in the CPU field.

With the development of the Internet of Things, Intel needs to find new breakthroughs, and developing the RISC-V open source chip architecture may be an opportunity.

Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, once said: "In the future, RISC-V is likely to develop into one of the world's mainstream CPUs." This is related to its open and simple characteristics. In terms of design, the main significance of RISC-V is that it is completely open source and free, free of licensing fees and intellectual property risks.

Compared with Arm, simplicity and flexibility are the two major advantages of RISC-V . When the RISC-V instruction set was first designed, its R&D team clearly stated that it would pursue simplicity and discard historical baggage. RISC-V has only more than 40 basic instructions and adopts a modular instruction set, which can meet the needs of processors of various complexities from microcontrollers to supercomputers, and supports multiple implementation methods from FPGA, ASIC and even future devices.

After a long period of development, the Arm architecture needs to be constantly forward compatible in its version iterations. The so-called forward compatibility means that the new version needs to support the functions of the old version. Each compatibility means the redundancy of instructions and the increase of development threshold. The development documents of the Arm architecture are as many as thousands of pages, and it takes a lot of time just to read through them.

In comparison, RISC-V has no historical baggage and has a certain latecomer advantage since its birth. The streamlined instruction set means streamlined development documents, which will also attract more developers to use it. And its excellent energy efficiency ratio makes it more suitable for the Internet of Things, AI chip market and server market that have high energy efficiency requirements.

SiFive has a first-mover advantage in the RISC-V field and holds a relatively high position in the RISC-V Foundation, so Intel's acquisition of it has aroused strong attention in the industry.

SiFive was founded in 2015 and provides chip IP based on RISC-V architecture. The SiFive Core IP product portfolio covers high-performance multi-core heterogeneous application processors to area-optimized low-power embedded microcontrollers. SiFive's IP is mainly divided into 2, 3/5, 7, and 8 series, with performance ranging from low to high.

In October 2018, SiFive launched a series of CPU design product lines that have threatened Arm's paid products , and also has 64-bit architecture products that the latter lacks. It is understood that 6 of the top 10 semiconductor companies in the world are partners of SiFive.

(Image source: SiFive)

In 2018, Intel was one of the investors in SiFive's Series C financing. Subsequently, in March 2021, SiFive announced a collaboration with Intel Foundry Business (IFB) to develop an innovative new RISC-V computing platform.

SiFive Inc announced it has raised an additional $60 million from investors including SK Hynix and Saudi Aramco , Reuters reported earlier . Existing investors including Qualcomm and Western Digital 's venture capital arms also joined the round.

The acquisition of SiFive can be seen as a proactive move by Intel. SiFive can bring Intel an IP library that can be used on its own chips or licensed to future customers. In other words, RISC-V will provide more solutions for Intel's customers together with x86.

( Photo source: ZhiIN )

If the acquisition of SiFive goes smoothly, Intel, which mainly uses X86 architecture, will have a richer IP library. This will also bring considerable challenges to the rise of Arm.

However, the acquisition negotiations are still in the early stages and there is no guarantee that an agreement will be reached. SiFive may choose to remain independent. In addition to Intel, SiFive has also received acquisition offers from several companies.

It is also worth noting that SiFive Inc. and the local Chinese team jointly established Shanghai StarFive Technology and its operating entity (Shanghai StarFive Technology Co., Ltd.) in August 2018. Unlike most multinational companies in the IC industry, Shanghai StarFive Technology is an independent company that operates independently in Greater China and is not a branch or subsidiary of SiFive. Shanghai StarFive Technology (StarFive) has previously stated that as an independent domestic semiconductor company, StarFive Technology is committed to inheriting and developing the core technology from the RISC-V invention team, so that RISC-V can form localized products as soon as possible and have completely independent intellectual property rights.