Intel has made a considerable amount of strategic announcements in the past month, whether it be its Tower Semi acquisition, its $20B Ohio investment or numerous disclosures at its recent investor day. I wanted to make sure another announcement it made didn’t slip through the cracks with Ventana Micro Systems.
Ventana Micro Systems Inc announced a strategic partnership with Intel earlier this month. The partnership will make Ventana’s RISC-V CPU cores and chiplets available through the Intel Foundry Services (IFS). As of last year, Intel has fully re-entered the foundry business with the introduction of IFS. The company will offer a wide range of IP to its customers with its new foundries, including RISC-V, X86, graphics, and much more. Last summer, I wrote about Intel’s IDM 2.0 strategy, and Intel Foundry Services was a big part of that announcement. If you want to dive deeper into Intel’s IDM 2.0 strategy, you can access that here. It takes a lot of buy-in from different SoC manufacturers to create a robust design ecosystem for a foundry. The addition of Ventana to the design ecosystem indicates to me that Intel is taking strengthening its design ecosystem very seriously.