Intel responded by suspending the RISC-V Pathfinder program: just a small team project
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Update time : 2023-01-30 11:20:28
Intel recently released the fourth quarter financial report of 2022, with a "catastrophic" performance, with a net loss of $664 million, down 114% year on year. This is almost the largest quarterly loss in Intel's history. Therefore, the company unexpectedly announced new cost reduction measures, including not investing in new products for its network switch business, and also announced the end of the RISC-V Pathfinder program.
Intel's ending of the RISC-V Pathfinder program was somewhat unexpected. There was no public statement except to suddenly inform participants that the company had stopped the program. Visit Intel's Pathfinder website to find the above notice: "Intel is stopping the Pathfinder program for Intel RISC-V with immediate effect". Intel's website also reminded that "since Intel will not provide any additional versions or bug fixes, we encourage you to make a timely transition to the third-party RISC-V software tool that best meets your development needs."
The Intel RISC-V Pathfinder Program has created a unified development environment for industrial users and amateurs. The program began in August 2022 and aims to help accelerate the development of RISC-V chips by using the unified integrated development environment (IDE) of the industry standard tool chain. These tools allow users to build RISC-V chips and then run them on FPGA. Many large RISC-V companies support this plan.
In response to this move, Intel representatives said that the decision to terminate the Intel Pathfinder Program of RISC-V had no impact on Intel OEM Service (IFS) and RISC-V development platform "Horse Creek". The company is still committed to supporting chips of all three main instruction sets - X86, Arm and RISC-V. The representative also said that the Pathfinder Plan was an "innovation project" of a small team of Intel, but it did not disclose the specific number of employees of the project.
It is understood that Intel has many other ongoing RISC-V plans. Intel and SiFive just released the HiFive Pro P550 RISC-V development board three days ago, and plan to launch it this summer. This board is driven by the Horse Creek processor manufactured by Intel OEM Service Department on the Intel 4 process. Intel also co invested with Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to establish a $426 million laboratory to develop RISC-V processors for future zettascale supercomputers, AI accelerators, autonomous vehicle and high-performance computing. Intel even created a $1 billion fund to help the company develop various chips, which will be manufactured in its IFS foundry, including x86, ARM and RISC-V designs.
