Intel has taken its first steps towards directly taking on Arm-based chips through a new partnership with potential acquisition target SiFive. The hook-up will see Intel license SiFive's chip architecture and fabricate a custom SoC expected in 2022.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-s-to-make-a-custom-SiFive-based-RISC-V-CPU-will-be-fabricated-on-a-7-nm-node-in-a-first-step-towards-competing-directly-with-Arm-based-chips.547583.0.html
I think this will be a great success. They should make a compact development board with 8 gig of RAM and 60 gig of fast flash two to four processors and a USB console for a hundred dollars and they will sell all they can make. The market is ready for an open source monster. It could take the tablet and laptop market by storm. Also industrial automation and upscale embedded applications. I would love to have one.
awesome news! Hope to reduce drastically power energy from consume! 5W Y series 10W U series(instead of 15-20) 25W H (instead of 45-65) and max 65W for K series far away from 150/200W of K nowadays series.
"It has had multiple setbacks with its fabrication processes that has considerably set back its chipset timeline."
yet they have been sampling Sapphire Rapids since Nov 2020, with pcie5, ddr5, cxl on a new process, with new cores and a third generation of Optane support. So, while they unquestionably had trouble with 10nm multi-patterning, it seems their designers seem to have been productive. The 10SF and 10ESF processes also appear to have solved yield and boost clock performance issues.