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DannyB writes:

From Tom's Hardware:

Intel and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) said they would invest €400 million (around $426 million) in a laboratory that will develop RISC-V-based processors that could be used to build zettascale supercomputers. However, the lab will not focus solely on CPUs for next-generation supercomputers but also on processor uses for artificial intelligence applications and autonomous vehicles.

The research laboratory will presumably be set up in Barcelona, Spain, and will receive €400 million from Intel and the Spanish Government over 10 years. The fundamental purpose of the joint research laboratory is to develop chips based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) that could be used for a wide range of applications, including AI accelerators, autonomous vehicles, and high-performance computing.

The creation of the joint laboratory does not automatically mean that Intel will use RISC-V-based CPUs developed in the lab for its first-generation zettascale supercomputing platform but rather indicates that the company is willing to make additional investments in RISC-V. After all, last year, Intel tried to buy SiFive, a leading developer of RISC-V CPUs and is among the top sponsors of RISC-V International, a non-profit organization supporting the ISA.

[....] throughout its history, Intel invested hundreds of millions in non-x86 architectures (including RISC-based i960/i860 designs in the 1980s, Arm in the 2000s, and VLIW-based IA64/Itanium in the 1990s and the 2000s). Eventually, those architectures were dropped, but technologies developed for them found their way into x86 offerings.

I would observe that a simple well designed instruction set could require less silicon. Possibly more cores per chip using same fabrication technology. Or more speculative execution branch prediction using up some of that silicon. I would mention compiler back ends, but that is a subject best not discussed in public.

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