Intel definitely needs a new ISA in the long- medium term as x86 is getting really long in the tooth with it's legacy and design decisions far from ideal by now.
It's very hard to get a new ISA accepted, and RISC-V is already gaining considerable interest and traction (particularily by the chinese). I don't believe Intel could really beat ARM with any kind of a new licensable ISA, let alone proprietary. The next best thing is to be the leading force behind the new open-source one.
This is another take.
This is my personal take on the issue.
What I would like to see is Intel/SiFive deal go through and to see them put some more effort in their Auto offerings and contribute back to the RISC V consortium.
Intel is the one of the top contributor to open source, if not the top (commit statistics across the OSS world indicate Intel is top). If they keep that same approach also to RISC-V ISA design it would really benefit a lot of adopters.
While Intel marketing is not the best, if I have to ask myself the question, with whom I would rather like to work with, B2B, engineer to engineer.
Would you work with a company who shares their code, send their Field Engineers and willing to debug their issues, listen to your concerns etc...?
Or would you rather work with a company who share absolutely nothing, whose docs need to be vetted and diluted before you can see? Who puts condition like 10x the FAE charges/hour if reported issue is your problem and normal charges if their problem? who thinks they are in charge of the solution not you, even though you are the customer?
I know what I would chose, and my experience with Intel was very good, both on the backend side and on the SoC side.
While we have moved away from Intel for some time due to different issues, I wish they could come back with something much more interesting because our cooperation was quite smooth. We worked with the Silvermont, Goldmont and other non public stuffs for a bunch of our products
I have been waiting for something like RISC-V a long while. By the time such a thing arrived, I was a bit far away from developing with such devices though.
I had a long enough history in Auto industry starting with small MCUs projects to full fat distributed compute platorms for highly Assisted Driving backed by V2X cloud backbone. And in my early days, If we ever have to take a look at which MPC5XXX series to choose and which one is best for our use case we would go nuts. There were just too many part numbers, more than 200+ just for MPC5XXX series, no joke, or probably even more. After selecting a specific part number we still need to do some custom CPLD/FPGA for some use cases like early collision detection which we cannot implement in software because the system needs to operate instantly from power on, which is not possible without waiting for the MCU to boot up.
Now, with RISCV you can choose a kit from Synopsys to build a custom SoC, the so called Domain Specific Processor.
With SiFive, Intel could offer me some IPs and differentiators to go along and also fab the SoC. Better than letting the competition have everything.
You could guess in which industry I work in