Leading Intel engineers found RISC-V company
An Intel team was supposed to develop a completely new CPU architecture. The project now appears to have been scrapped.
(Image: HomeArt/Shutterstock.com)
A CPU engineer and three engineers have left Intel and founded their own company, Ahead Computing. They aim to develop RISC-V processor technology.
In itself, the founding of Ahead by former Intel experts would not be particularly important news. However, there are several indications that the departure of the four experts is linked to changes to Intel's roadmap for the coming years. This is because the four people previously occupied high-ranking positions in Intel's Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG), which the renowned CPU architect Jim Keller is said to have set up during his time at Intel from 2018 to 2020.
While Intel has confirmed the existence of the AADG, there has only been speculation about its goals. According to this, it was about an innovative CPU architecture codenamed "Royal Core". One of its innovations was allegedly so-called "rentable units" instead of hyper-threading: the processor splits a thread into several parts and distributes them across several computing cores. Intel was expected to implement parts of Royal Core in processors codenamed "Beast Lake" from around 2026. Intel never officially mentioned Beast Lake either; the series was thought to be a successor to the Intel 18A processor "Panther Lake" announced for 2025.
At the beginning of August , the YouTube channel "Moore's Law Is Dead" claimed that Intel had dissolved the Advanced Architecture Development Group and canceled the Beast Lake desktop processor family. The channel doesn't have the best ratings when it comes to rumors, but the founding of Ahead Computing now backs up the claims. Intel has also announced that it will be looking for potential savings in all departments, only implementing the most promising projects and laying off around 15 percent of its employees.
The core team behind Ahead Computing
The CEO of Ahead is Debbie Marr, who spent 33 years at Intel. She was part of the company management as a Fellow and led the AADG as Chief Architect. Until 2017/2018, she was specifically involved in the development of Core i and Xeon processors – in that year, the Core i-8000 (Coffee Lake), Core i-9000X (Skylake-X) and Skylake-Xeons were current.
Marr's less glorious involvement includes the Pentium 4 (Prescott), where she was responsible for the Hyper-Threading implementation.
The other co-founders of Ahead Computing are:
- Jonathan Pearce – most recently chief engineer and "key technologist & strategist" at Intel
- Srikanth Srinivasan – most recently head of the front and back-end teams for Royal Core
- Mark Dechene – most recently chief engineer for Royal Core's memory system
It is questionable to what extent Intel still uses ideas from the Royal Core design. The company could implement individual design components in future processor generations. There will no longer be a hard switch to an entirely new architecture.
Rumors around Intel
Rumors about the dissolution of the Advanced Architecture Development Group are circulating on Reddit, which cannot be verified but sound plausible. According to the rumors, Intel has disbanded the group and distributed the development team to other groups. A large part allegedly switched to GPU development, primarily to upgrade the AI accelerator Falcon Shore.
In early 2023 – before the AI boom –, Intel is said to have significantly thinned out the GPU teams. What speaks for this: At that time, the company canceled the Ponte Vecchio successor Rialto Bridge and postponed the successor Falcon Shores from 2024 to 2025. Debbie Marr and other team members are said to have disagreed with the direction.
They are now developing CPU cores with the open instruction set RISC-V. It is currently unclear where the journey will take them. Typically, such teams create their own designs before they are taken over by one of the major semiconductor companies. This is what happened most recently with Nuvia, founded by former Apple CPU expert Gerard Williams III, among others, which was later taken over by Qualcomm.
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