Intel is handing Atom chip IP to Rosaic, a startup run by one of Lip-Bu Tan’s old mates, Amarjit Gill.
Gill has history with Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan, who has spent years as a semiconductor investor as well as an industry operator.
According to Reuters, Gill invested with Tan in high-performance chip startup Nuvia and worked with him on RISC-V chip outfit Rivos. Chipzilla’s Atom chips are built for low-power jobs, where they mostly scrap with designs from British chip blueprint outfit Arm.
At one point, Chipzilla aimed Atom at Android devices through a partnership with Google, before that plan went pear-shaped.
The latest Atom chips arrived in the first quarter of 2026, after Chipzilla refreshed its P-series line. Those chips are aimed at server and networking jobs.
The refresh followed the announcement of two new Atom X series chips in the third quarter of 2025. Reuters said Chipzilla will transfer register-transfer level code for Atom processors to Rosaic.
That RTL code describes how input data moves through CPU registers before turning into output, which is proper crown-jewels stuff.
It seems likely that sharing would give Rosaic deep access to Chipzilla’s intellectual property and help it build custom chips. That makes the arrangement more interesting than a routine licence deal, especially given Gill’s ties to Tan.
Tan joined Chipzilla in 2025 and is trying to turn the company around through AI and its battered foundry business. Chipzilla and AMD remain the world’s biggest designers and sellers of x86 chips.
China’s Shanghai Zhaoxin Semiconductor and Hygon Information Technology serve China’s domestic market for personal computing chips.
Under Tan, Chipzilla wants to ride the need for agentic AI computing, where traditional processors could get another spell in the sun.