Intel today announced a key partnership, enabling chipmakers to build low-power SoCs on its 18A process. The collaboration will focus on the design of mobile chipsets with Arm-based CPU cores and then move to automotive, IoT, data center, and aerospace and government applications.
Arm customers who design their chipsets around Cortex CPU cores will be able to use Intel’s “breakthrough transistor technologies to improve power and performance,” read a press release issued by both parties. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel Corporation, said this “multigenerational deal” will open up new options and approaches for companies looking to use next-generation process technology.
Intel will provide the foundry for chip designers to actually produce those chips, while Arm will provide a co-optimization of design technology (DTCO) to enable easier process flow and improved power, performance, area and cost for Arm cores.
The announcement is part of the IDM 2.0 strategy, in which Intel is investing heavily in manufacturing capacity around the world, including expansions in the United States and the European Union. Such a move would balance the supply chain and ease the bottleneck currently created by massive demand from a handful of chip makers.
The Intel 18A process is basically a 1.8nm technology. A stands for Angstrom, a metric unit of length one step smaller than a nanometer, or one ten-billionth of a meter, even one hundred-millionth of a centimeter. The move to such technology is a statement that future SoCs will become even smaller with even higher transistor density.
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