Wednesday, October 25th 2023
SiFive to Lay Off Hundreds of Staff Amid Changing RISC-V Market Dynamics
SiFive is a team of one of the pioneering engineers that helped create RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) and helped the ecosystem grow. The company has been an active member of the RISC-V community and contributed its guidance on various RISC-V extensions. However, according to sources close to More Than Moore, the company is reportedly downsizing its team, and layoffs are imminent. The impact of the downsizing is about 20% of the workforce, which equals around 120-130 staff. However, that is only part of the story. SiFive is reportedly also canceling its pre-designed core portfolio and shifting focus on custom-design core IP that it would sell to customers. This is in line with the slowing demand for their pre-designed offerings and the growing demand for AI-enhanced custom silicon. The company issued a statement for Moore Than Moore.
Additionally, there was another statement for More Than Moore, which you can see entirely below.
Source:
More Than Moore
SiFive PR for Moore Than MooreAs we adjust to the rapidly changing semiconductor end markets, SiFive is realigning across all of our teams and geographies to better take advantage of the opportunities ahead, reduce operational complexities and increase our ability to respond quickly to customer product requirements. Unfortunately, as a result some positions were eliminated last week. The employees are being offered severance and outplacement assistance. SiFive continues to be excited about the momentum and long-term outlook for our business and RISC-V.
Second statement for More Than Moore As we identify and focus on our greatest opportunities, SiFive is shifting to best meet our customers' fast-changing requirements by undergoing a strategic refocusing of all our global teams.
Unfortunately, with this realignment, approximately 20% of employees across all different business groups and levels were impacted. The employees are receiving severance and outplacement assistance.
SiFive continues to be excited about the long-term opportunities for the company and for RISC-V. The growth of the company has never been stronger and the opportunities never better. We are well funded for years in the future and continue to work with the market leaders in every segment.
We remain focused on our four product groups, essential, intelligence, performance and automotive, and as we explained in a press event earlier this month, have a robust roadmap to meet the needs of these markets. We see tremendous new opportunities in AI and with Consumer products like wearables and mobile as Google brings Android to the RISC-V ecosystem.
We will continue to offer customization for specific customers, offering standard and custom products where it makes sense from a business standpoint.
23 Comments on SiFive to Lay Off Hundreds of Staff Amid Changing RISC-V Market Dynamics
this destroys the affordability for small projects that don’t have the capital to have a custom core developed for them.
ARM is a greedy shit company that gouges it's licensees and it's also unpredictable.
RISC-V even if the ISA is flawed(it lacks a LOT of much needed instructions because they deemed so) being "free" is what's going to drive it, there's already lot of risc-v being used in small things and more on the way(HDD controllers, microcontrollers, wearables, IoT, etc)
What you won't see anytime soon is a consumer computing device with risc-v
Hundreds of small companies with really good ideas and products did Not survive a competition with monsters like, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft, IBM, etc. Just take a look at Qualcomm's attempts to compete with Intel and AMD notebooks.
The situation would change if Google commits itself to RISC-V and Android smartphones with RISC-V processor flood the market.
Google does use RISC-V in their smartphones, just not as the main CPU :)
Check out prices for DC-ROMA laptop:
www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004822193933.html
A couple of months ago it was cheaper. Here are my records:
...
DC ROMA RISC-V notebook ( as of June 2023 )
Basic - $ 1,499 USD
Standard - $ 2,499 USD
Premium - $ 4,999 USD
...
DC ROMA RISC-V notebook ( as of October 2023 )
Basic - $ 3,072 USD
Standard - $ 5,117 USD
Premium - $ 10,228 USD
AFAIK google was actively working on porting android to RISC-V, but we also have an issue of "chicken and egg", no big player wants to devote resources to develop a big high performance risc-v SoC (something on the order of a PC processor with 300W TDP) or even a "high performance low power" call-phone/tablet device because the software is not even close to being there.
Kind of what happened with itanium
www.techpowerup.com/314854/qualcomm-to-bring-risc-v-based-wearable-platform-to-wear-os-by-google
(There are also RISCV microcontrollers in Nvidia GPUs and I think Western Digital hard drives, both of which are sold to consumers. But those aren't CPUs as the consumer thinks of them and aren't really visible to the user in any way.)
RISC-V has a lot of flaws for something that should have learnt from the past 50+ years of CPU design. It's only getting attention because of ARM's strongarm tactics. We need an instruction set which is technically on the level of ARMv8 but without the ARM copyrights and lawyers.
I express my point of view as a C/C++ Software Engineer working on a RISC-V related scientific project. Everything I needed for the software development Is Ported to RISC-V platforms. My Software Development Environment consists of four setups:
- On Windows 7 Professional using a MinGW-based cross-compiler for Freestanding mode emulation and debugging using GDB
- Ubuntu 20.04 for RISC-V ( in QEMU )
- Fedora 33 for RISC-V ( in QEMU )
- Debian 6.3/6.4 for RISC-V ( in QEMU )
Even if the performance of emulation in QEMU is so-so, my setup is very Flexible, Completely Isolated from RISC-V low level hardware of SBCs, and Allows me to change Linux-based operating systems in a matter of seconds. Another thing is a project I've been working on is very portable from the beginning.
On the other hand, Qualcomm wants to sell to Windows customers and there is no Windows for RISC-V.
unless risc-v also gets a x86 emulation close to native speed i don't see it succedding, much like Qualcomm's attempts at ARM windows computers that will heavily depend on Microsoft windows for ARM. Risc-v for consumer/end user won't take off until you get windows running on it natively, and as i've said just before, Windows is still not running "good" in ARM with "maybe next year with the new qualcomm cpu" even after how many years....
The big issue there is MS doesnt have an answer for rosetta2, so anything not ARM native runs like slop. Hardware can only go so far if the translation layer is trash. Much as I'd love to see it fixed, I dont see it happening anytime soon unless the FOSS community makes one for linux that can be transposed to windows.
SiFive was designing RISC-V microarchitectures which could be licensed by other companies.
If they plan to be and the market is as hot as they anticipate for custom AI asics then there shouldnt be a reason to lay off that much staff assuming they are going to make as much as they think they will. AI is a booming market, I anticipate they will need to hire that much staff back if they are successful.
Good news is, these decisions often are the painting on the wall and even if I wasnt affected I would leave this company (as I have left companies in the past) anyway given the terrible way they appear to be managed.