Intel’s strategy for outflanking Arm takes shape with bet on RISC-V

Enlarge (credit: ony Avelar/Bloomberg )

Many of Intel’s current woes can be traced to the fact that the company was left out of the iPhone. Whether Intel passed on the opportunity or couldn’t meet the spec is by now a moot point, but missing out on the particular smartphone revolution—and its billions of chips—played no small part in the company falling behind the leading edge .

Now, Intel is ponying up $1 billion in an attempt to avoid repeating history.

The company announced an “innovation fund” this week that places bets on a couple of key technologies, chief among them RISC-V, a free, open source instruction set that shows promise in low-power and embedded systems, markets that are expected to grow significantly over the next several years.