Intel Fortinet FortiSP6 Cover

Intel and Fortinet today made a big announcement for a future ASIC. The companies announced that they would be working together on the Fortinet Security Processor 6 (SP6). Just to be clear, this is Intel’s Fortinet SP6, not AMD’s socket SP6 that is for products like AMD EPYC 8005 Sorano. For Fortinet, this is putting a lot of faith in Intel. For Intel, this is a great customer win, outside of the traditional AI space, that it is able to disclose.

First off, folks may not know this, but Fortinet designs its own ASICs and has been doing this for years. For example, we covered the Fortinet FortiSP5 ASIC Launch and have seen the FortiSOC4 in our Fortinet FortiGate FG-40F and Fortinet FortiGate FG-60F Reviews. In those reviews, we saw some of the clear signs that Fortinet was not just using an off-the-shelf CPU to do all of its processing. Indeed, when we opened those units up, we were treated to find the custom silicon inside.

While we do not have specs for the Fortinet Security Processor 6 (SP6), one of the interesting aspects we covered in the SP5 launch (not to be confused with AMD EPYC SP5) was that it did a direct comparison to “industry-standard CPUs,” which at the time was likely an Intel Xeon D or Atom processor. In either case, the direct comparison of the Fortinet FortiSP5 was likely to an Intel CPU.

For Intel, this is actually a big deal. Fortinet is providing the expertise on its security processor. Intel is providing advanced design, packaging, and manufacturing capabilities. I believe the FortiSP5 was a TSMC 7nm processor, so Intel is gaining a customer that was previously TSMC’s.

To me, the standout is not just that Intel got a TSMC customer. It is also that Intel is gaining a TSMC customer in a borderline competitive product category with its x86 franchise. To give you some sense, Fortinet is mostly software and service revenue, so if the company had $7B of trailing 12-month revenue, you would expect roughly $5B to be service revenue. Fortinet is often a roughly 70% service, 30% hardware revenue business. That hardware is not just the security ASIC, so this does not seem like a $10B/ year win for Intel’s Foundry business. Instead, this seems like winning a component of a portion of a $2B revenue stream. Still, it is big news since it is a public win for Intel Foundry nd in a segment that tangentially competes with Intel Products.