Intel(英特爾)的zen時刻快到來?

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Interestingly, but some industry analysts now call an unexpected comeback a 'Zen moment' even when they ask Intel about its future breakthroughs. Being a huge company with plenty of engineering resources, Intel understood Zen threat early enough and while Ice Lake/Sunny Cove as well as Tiger Lake/Willow Cove were good CPUs, Alder Lake/Golden Cove is expected to be Intel's true breakthrough.  

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"So, the three major [Alder Lake] architectural announcements we think are pretty Zen-like in that sense where you have defined major new efforts," Pat Gelsinger said in a conversation with Pierre Ferragu, an analyst with New Street Research (via @witeken). "Trust me, we have a few [more] that are still cooking back in the labs that […] we think are pretty dramatic step[s] forward, well beyond anything that we have talked about yet. And some of those we might not talk about for a couple of years yet, but innovation, you know, the geek is back."

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One of the key elements of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy is the company's newly created Intel Foundry Services (IFS) group that will manufacture chips for others. This group can operate as a classic foundry making any chips its clients want: Arm-based system-on-chips, RISC-V-based controllers, tensor processing units (TPUs), or graphics processing units (GPUs), just to name a few options.  

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But Intel can naturally add a unique sauce to its IFS offering: highly competitive general-purpose x86 cores as well as an extremely broad portfolio of its silicon-proven IPs. Earlier this year Intel said that it was in discussion with over 100 of potential IFS customers and recently it revealed that about 1/3 of them were interested in custom x86-based SoCs.   

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"We are going to monetize x86 cores in our products, but we are also going to enable them to be monetized on other people's products where they can innovate around them," said Gelsinger. "We have gotten quite a lot of interest from some of our traditional customer saying, so 'I can go create my own version of Xeon?' And the answer is yes. 'I could mix it with some of my unique requirements for networking?' Yes. 'I could deprecate some of the transistors I am not using in those configurations.' Yes. […] I'll say [we are] breathing life back into the x86 in a number of domains, because that was only possible on the Arm ecosystem before."

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"One of the things Pat has done is he accelerated our engagement with the ecosystem to make sure that we are getting the same benefit out of this amazing ecosystem that has been built over the last 13 years," said Davis. "We are much closer today than we were before with the EDA vendors, much closer today with the equipment suppliers. We used to tell them what to do, now we are making sure that we understand what the best practices are, how do you get the most productivity out of tools."  

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Intel's foray into the contract manufacturing business opens some new doors to the company as it can work closer with various big customers (e.g., cloud giants) and can help them develop full-custom SoCs based on its IP, which spreads its technologies beyond traditional CPUs and platforms. If the strategy works, this will make Intel far more competitive against Arm. According to Intel, out of IFS's 100+ potential customers, about one third would want a custom x86-based SoC.  

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But while Intel will invest considerably more in its own manufacturing, it will still outsource some of its products if it needs to. The company clearly understands that its architectures are even more valuable than its manufacturing prowess, so it intends to make products using the best technology available.

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https://www.tomshardware.com/new ... ant-custom-x86-socs