India courts IBM, Intel, and Tower for chip partnerships - all in one day India’s pursuit of a slice of the world’s semiconductor industry has seen it court three major players – Intel, Tower Semiconductors, and IBM – on a single day. The Intel and Tower talks appear to have been broad. Tech Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar met with Tower CEO Russell Ellwanger in an exchange he described as a …
IBM may not know much about RISC-V, but it knows a lot about how to make processors, as even though it sold off it's fabs, it kept it's R&D capabilities. I would not be at all surprised if there are people in IBM already looking at it, anyway.
RISC-V is an ISA (and the base definition quite a simple one at that) rather than a processor hardware design, so I would not be at all surprised if IBM could knock together a reasonably performant RISC-V demonstrator using a microcoded Power processor without too much difficulty. And remember, Power has already used to create low power embedded processors for years, Not everything Power related is as powerful as Power10.
What people have been concentrating on is that hardware designs to implement RISC-V are within the grasp of quite modest chip designers, but that does not mean that all implementations have to be pure hardware.
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