Intel is quietly handing one of its crown jewels to a tiny, stealthy startup. And that startup is run by a longtime business partner of Intel’s own chief executive.
The chipmaker is giving RosaicLabs access to its Atom processor technology, according to a source and documents reviewed by Reuters. Atom is the building block of its central processors. It is a rare move for Intel, which almost never licenses pieces of its x86 architecture.
Rosaic is led by Amarjit Gill, a veteran chip executive and venture investor. He and Intel boss Lip-Bu Tan are longtime co-investors. The pair helped build the founding team at Rivos, a chip startup that Meta bought last year, outbidding Intel, while Tan was its chairman. Both also backed Nuvia, later sold to Qualcomm.
What Intel is actually handing over
The transfer is not trivial. Intel aims to ship Rosaic the register-transfer level (RTL) code for Atom. That is the low-level blueprint describing how the chip works.
