GlobalFoundries trying to become AMD again. 😁
I didn’t think of that, but it’s true! 😄
I’m happy to see a big company put in money into RISC-V. I think this could work out. Unlike Intel competing on the bleeding edge, GF may be going for cheaper lower compute requirement use cases which I can see working out and keeping their foundries busy. There was an article a year ago about GlobalFoundry’s customers shifting to sub-10nm faster than anticipated which they abandoned their pursuits 7 years ago. Maybe they can compete for any of the car chips, appliances, TV and TV boxes, defense applications, everything that Rockchip and Amlogic chips show up in
Interesting move considering that having design and manufacturing separate for reasons of incentive alignment and conflict of interest seems like the more successful strategy.
But I guess with RISC-V the market is still so small this might help them try and create a niche and induce some demand? Because otherwise I think they have it pretty rough since abandoning the leading edge race. This article from last year reported that clients are switching to smaller nodes faster than expected (which I assume is a trend that has continued) and China probably also has only accelerated their own capacities including for older nodes.
Worth pointing out that MIPS is a mere shadow of it’s former self (some of my first routers were based on MIPS). They are currently a relatively small RISC-V design firm.
