Intel Foundry Update
Intel Foundry has been releasing content on its products and services, and today, an interesting update came across. Intel showed a reference "Deer Creek Falls" SoC of what they call a "non-x86" design, manufactured on the 18A node. However, the design is actually Arm-based SoC. Consisting of seven cores, the reference SoC packs a single performance core, two efficiency cores, and four low-power efficiency cores, alongside the embedded PCIe and memory controller IPs and PHYs from ecosystem partners. While this may not be an impressive design, it demonstrates that a heterogeneous design of hybrid cores and IPs from ecosystem partners exists, and it's likely that we will see some designs emerging from this.
While Intel didn't explicitly mention that this SoC is Arm, later in the video, in the section on performance tuning, there are mentions of AArch64, which is Arm's designation for the 64-bit Arm ISA flavor. Alongside the design, Intel also demonstrated that the company offers a suite of performance optimization tools, even for Arm-based processors, allowing its customers to optimize and enhance software performance on their preferred platform, not just the x86 ISA. Hopefully, external foundry customers are slowly becoming aware of Intel Foundry's capabilities, and the scale can commence, especially now that Intel is under supervision from the U.S. government.
14:10 UTC: Update: Intel has delisted the video from its YouTube channel, but our screenshots remain. While the 18A node showed little interest for external customers, Intel plans to use it extensively across its product lines. For 14A, Intel has evaluated switching its approach and evaluating if customers want to utilize it first, then build more 14A capacity. However, that plan is likely scrapped, and Intel will continue leading-edge node development unconditionally. There are already reports of companies like Apple and NVIDIA evaluating Intel's 14A node, so the Foundry could finally catch some momentum. As the U.S. government also showed interest, we can expect to see many more designs going through the gates of Intel Foundry in the coming quarters.
