Intel Foundry Demonstrates First Arm-Based Chip on 18A Node

Summary

Intel Foundry needs external customers, as the company claims that if it doesn't find more, it may have to "pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes." That could explain why the company posted a video today on its YouTube channel showing off "Deer Creek Falls", a new "reference SoC" fabricated on its 18A process. The video has since been removed, which is why we're crediting TechPowerUp on the screenshots, but it clearly showed Deer Creek Falls, the "Intel Foundry's Reference SOC With Ecosystem IPs and non-x86 Cores." There was even a slide with a diagram, showing that Deer Creek Falls was a chip with two "Ecosystem" PCIe controllers, four "Ecosystem" memory channels (likely 16- or 32-bit), four energy-efficient cores, two "power-optimized" cores, and one "highest performance" core. This three-tier CPU core configuration is typical of a great many Arm-based SoCs, such as the Snapdragon 8 line from Qualcomm. As such, we'd probably assume that this chip was Arm-based anyway, but we don't have to because the video explicitly mentioned AArch64, which means that this is a reasonably modern Arm SoC. Why is Intel manufacturing an Arm SoC as a reference platform? Probably because it's trying to attract external customers, and there's a whole lot more companies building Arm SoCs than there are firms pitching x86-64 processors. That's by design, of course, but regardless, it is the case. By making such a chip, Intel is effectively saying "Hey, we can make Arm chips!" TechPowerUp reports that, besides the reference platform, the video showed a suite of performance optimization tools, which runs contrary to the rumor that Intel Foundry had not yet prepared such tools for its customers. Indeed, the conventional wisdom has been that Intel Foundry's current inability to find a "significant" external customer was down to the difficulty of implementing external designs on Intel's process. It seems like that may no longer be an issue, or at least somewhat mit...