• A growing number of companies are using open-source licenses to develop processors based on RISC-V.
• SiFive recently released two of the new chip designs, and was also rumored to be in acquisition talks with Intel a few months ago.
• The SiFive P270 and P550 are faster; they have more features than previous-gen products, and are more economical to produce.
SiFive, a prominent player in the chip industry, announced a new family of processor cores that push the feature set and performance of RISC-V to new heights — and industry giant Intel is already on board.
At this very moment, the device you’re using to read this text most likely uses x86 or Arm instructions, the most commonly used in chips across the processor industry. In recent years, however, the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture has been making waves — thanks in no small part to SiFive.
The RISC-V instruction set is offered under open-source licenses, which means it does not require any fees to use. As a result, a growing number of companies are offering — or are currently developing — RISC-V-based hardware and compatible software, and tool sets.
SiFive’s success in the embedded space, coupled with a rapidly expanding ecosystem of compatible open-source libraries and tools, has propelled the company into a leadership position in the RISC-V market. In fact, rumors indicated Intel was considering acquiring the company for more than $2 billion. While that did not happen, Intel’s interest in SiFive was clear.
What sets the SiFive P270 and P550 apart from existing designs?
SiFive has multiple processor families in its arsenal. The company recently released its SiFive Intelligence Family, targeting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. And its extensive Essential Family is comprised of a wide array of U-, S-, and E-series processors for low-power and diverse embedded applications. The just-announced SiFive Performance Family of processors will initially be comprised of two new cores, the P270 and flagship P550, and the company claims the latter is its highest-performance processor core to date.
The SiFive P270 and P550 are faster and have more features than previous-gen products, and are more economical to produce than the chips you’re likely using right now.
The P270 is SiFive’s first Linux-capable processor with full support for the RISC-V vector extension v1.0rc. It features an 8-stage, dual-issue pipeline and is compatible with the RV64GCV instruction set architecture (ISA).
The P550 is a different sort of animal, though. It features a longer thirteen-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline that’s compatible with the RV64GC ISA and allows the chip to reach higher frequencies. The P550 leverages SiFive’s U84 microarchitecture and scales up to quad-core configurations.
With its SPECInt 2006 score of 8.65/GHz, SiFive claims the P550 is the highest performance RISC-V processor available today, but there’s an additional twist. A quad-core SiFive P550 uses a similar amount of silicon die area as a single ARM Cortex-A75. The small and efficient design of the SiFive P550 means it offers a significant performance-per-area advantage over ARM’s popular Cotex-A75 solution, which is employed in a wide array of mobile devices.
Intel will be manufacturing P550 cores on its upcoming 7nm process node to further enable the RISC-V ecosystem and presumably instill confidence in potential partners that may be interested in Intel’s chip foundry service business.
The new SiFive P270 and P550 cores are available now.
VisualSim has several RISC-V processor models that can model RISC-V processors:
(1) /VisualSim_Path/VS_AR/demo/system_architecture/SSD/SSD_RISC_V.xml
(2) /VisualSim_Path/VS_AR/demo/HAL/RISC_V/RISCV_InOrder.xml
(3) /VisualSim_Path/VS_AR/demo/HAL/RISC_V/RISCV_OoO.xml
Web Reference: https://fintecology.com/2021/06/22/a-new-chip-design-used-by-intel-may-reshape-the-chip-industry
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