Today at Embedded World, SiFive, Inc., the pioneer and leader of RISC-V computing, unveiled its new state-of-the-art RISC-V development board, the HiFive Premier P550. The board will be available for large-scale deployment through Arrow Electronics so developers around the world can test and develop new RISC-V applications like machine vision, video analysis, AI PC and others, allowing them to use AI and other cutting-edge technologies across many different market segments.

With a quad-core SiFive Performance P550 processor, the HiFive Premier P550 is the highest performance RISC-V development board in the industry, and the latest in the popular HiFive family. Designed to meet the computing needs of modern workloads, the out-of-order P550 core delivers superior compute density and performance in an energy-efficient area footprint. Furthermore, the modular design of the HiFive Premier P550, which includes a replaceable system-on-module (SOM) board, gives developers the flexibility they need to tailor their designs.

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.

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.

Additionally, there was another statement for More Than Moore, which you can see entirely below.

Shenzhen based Milk-V has been busy announcing some very high performance RISC-V based platforms, and has now added another to a rapidly growing list. The Milk-V Mars is a new hobbiest grade RISC-V SBC that intentionally mimics the footprint and layout of the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, so much so that existing cases and accessories will fit. The credit-card sized Mars packs a very competent array of features, starting with the StarFive JH7110 SoC. The JH7110 contains four 64-bit SiFive U74 RISC-V cores clocked as high as 1.5 GHz as well as an integrated Imagination Technologies IMG BXE-2-32 graphics engine with support for Vulkan 1.3, OpenGL ES 3.x, OpenCL 3.0, and Android NN HAL. This SoC should be the perfect choice for an SBC in this form factor, as it has proven to be on the similarly sized PINE64 Star64 as well as StarFive's VisionFive 2. Surrounding the SoC is a single LPDDR4 module, configurable at purchase up to 8 GB, the traditional 40-pin GPIO header row, a M.2 E-Key for WiFi/BT expansion, a MIPI display serial interface with 4K30 output and H.264/H.265 4K60 decoding, MIPI camera serial interface, HDMI, a USB-C for 5 V power input, a 3.5 mm audio jack, and finally the rear I/O block which consists of three USB 3.0 Type-A, a single USB 2.0 Type-A, and the RJ-45 for Gigabit Ethernet as well as PoE. Storage is expandable with both eMMC and microSD cards. The last tiny header is for powering a fan, which many R Pi cases opt to include, but is not included with the Mars. Availability of the Milk-V Mars is listed as "Coming Soon" and prices have not yet been announced. However to compete with the other options on the market we hope, and expect, that it does not exceed $75 USD. Unlike the Milk-V Pioneer there hasn't been any word on whether the Mars will be as open-source friendly, but it would behoove them to consider the option for this type of hobbyist oriented device.

Back in February 2022 SiFive announced its partnership with Intel Foundry Services (IFS), to bring its "Horse Creek" SoC to market and now SiFive has announced that it's getting ready to launch its first development board on said SoC. This summer, SiFive will launch the HiFive Pro P550 development board, which will kick things up a serious notch when it comes to embedded SoC development boards, regardless of the CPU core the SoC is built around. The HiFive Pro P550 will be one of few microATX based embedded SoC development boards out there and so far, to our knowledge, the only one with a RISC-V based SoC. The Horse Creek SoC sports quad core, 2.2 GHz, 13-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline RISC-V RV64GBC CPU built on the Intel 4 node. The SoC also has a DDR5 5600 MHz memory interface, support for eight lanes of PCIe 5.0 and comes in a 19 x 19 mm FBGA package.

The HiFive Pro P550 will offer 16 GB of DDR5 memory, but based on the render of the motherboard, this is soldered to the board, rather than relying on standard DDR5 DIMMs. Furthermore, the board has two x16 PCIe 3.0 expansion slots, although it's unclear how many PCIe each slot features, as well as a PCIe 3.0 M.2 2280 M-key slot for NVMe SSDs and a PCIe 3.0 M.2 E-key slot for a WiFi/Bluetooth module. The board also sports multiple USB/USB 3.0 ports and even a pair of USB-C ports. The press release also mentions both Gigabit and 10 Gbps Ethernet support, as well as support for onboard graphics and remote system management, without going into any further details. It'll be interesting to see if the Horse Creek SoC can deliver on its expected performance target, especially as SiFive has a lot to prove, especially as the company calls the RISC-V architecture inevitable.

SiFive, Inc. the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced two new products that address the need for high performance and efficiency in a small size in high volume applications like wearables, smart home, industrial automation, AR/VR, and other consumer devices. The SiFive Performance P670 and P470 RISC-V processors bring unparalleled compute performance and efficiency that is significantly raising the bar for innovative designs in these high-volume markets. The modern and innovative SiFive design methodologies bring raw compute density that is a substantial advantage for SiFive Performance products and also translates into significant cost savings for customers.

"The P670 and P470 are specifically designed for, and capable of handling the most demanding workloads for wearables and other advanced consumer applications. These new products offer powerful performance and compute density for companies looking to upgrade from legacy ISAs," said Chris Jones, SiFive VP of Product. "We have optimized these new RISC-V Vector enabled products to deliver the performance and efficiency improvements the industry has long been asking for, and we are in evaluations with a number of top-tier customers. Additionally, as the upstream enablement of RISC-V has started within the Android Open Source Project, (AOSP), designers will have unrivaled choice and flexibility as they consider the positive implications with that platform for future designs."

SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced it has been selected by NASA to provide the core CPU for NASA's next generation High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor. HPSC is expected to be used in virtually every future space mission, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions. HPSC will utilize an 8-core, SiFive Intelligence X280 RISC-V vector core, as well as four additional SiFive RISC-V cores, to deliver 100x the computational capability of today's space computers. This massive increase in computing performance will help usher in new possibilities for a variety of mission elements such as autonomous rovers, vision processing, space flight, guidance systems, communications, and other applications.

"As the leading RISC-V, U.S. based, semiconductor company we are very proud to be selected by the premier world space agency to power their most mission critical applications," said Jack Kang, SVP Business Development, SiFive. "The X280 demonstrates orders of magnitude performance gains over competing processor technology and our SiFive RISC-V IP allows NASA to take advantage of the support, flexibility, and long-term viability of the fast-growing global RISC-V ecosystem. We've always said that with SiFive the future has no limits, and we're excited to see the impact of our innovations extend well beyond our planet."

SiFive Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced the release of the latest version of its SiFive Intelligence X280 processor, which introduces significant new features including scalability up to a 16-core cache-coherent complex, WorldGuard trusted protection, and a new interface allowing for seamless integration between the X280 vector unit and customer-designed external AI accelerators or other coprocessors, called VCIX (Vector Coprocessor Interface eXtension). Collectively, these enhanced features deliver unmatched scalability, security, and interoperability to the SiFive X280, the most widely adopted implementation of the RISC-V Vector extension. This latest version of the X280 is a powerful solution for those looking for alternatives to legacy SIMD-style architectures.

Publicly available since April 2021, the SiFive Intelligence X280 has seen rapid adoption as customers gravitate towards its unique combination of performance, power efficiency, and an intuitive programming model. The X280 has claimed double-digit design wins in the past six months alone, in a wide variety of data-driven applications, including AI inference, image processing, datacenter acceleration, and automotive use cases.

Researchers from Università di Bologna and CINECA, the largest supercomputing center in Italy, have been playing with the concept of developing a RISC-V supercomputer. The team has laid the grounds for the first-ever implementation that demonstrates the capability of the relatively novel ISA to run high-performance computing. To create a supercomputer, you need pieces of hardware that seem like Lego building blocks. Those are called clusters, made from a motherboard, processor, memory, and storage. Italian researchers decided to try and use something different than Intel/AMD solution to the problem and use a processor based on RISC-V ISA. Using SiFive's Freedom U740 SoC as the base, researchers named their RISC-V cluster "Monte Cimone."

Monte Cimone features four dual-board servers, each in a 1U form factor. Each board has a SiFive's Freedom U740 SoC with four U74 cores running up to 1.4 GHz and one S7 management core. In total, eight nodes combine for a total of 32 RISC-V cores. Paired with 16 GB of 64-bit DDR4 memory operating at 1866s MT/s, PCIe Gen 3 x8 bus running at 7.8 GB/s, one gigabit Ethernet port, USB 3.2 Gen 1 interfaces, the system is powered by two 250 Watt PSUs to support future expansion and addition of accelerator cards.

SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced it has raised $175 million in a Series F financing round, valuing the company at over $2.5 billion. The Series F round was led by Coatue Management, a global technology investment firm that invests in companies at all stages - from venture to growth through public markets. SiFive is substantially accelerating the development of the company's RISC-V products, future roadmap, and ecosystem to achieve the unlimited potential that RISC-V has for SiFive's customers and partners.

Founded six years ago by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive introduced the world to the open standard ISA and transformed the future of compute. Today, RISC-V is firmly established as one of the major global compute platforms, with adoption all around the world, as evidenced by recent industry announcements including the Intel $1B innovation fund, featuring a goal of catalyzing the RISC-V ecosystem. SiFive has design wins with more than 100 customers including several of the world's largest hyperscale companies and 8 of the top 10 semiconductor companies, in applications ranging from automotive, AR/VR, client computing, data center, and intelligent edge.

SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced the company will support Intel Foundry Services (IFS) innovation fund's goal to build innovative new RISC-V computing platforms optimized for Intel process technology. The $1B Intel fund will support the creation of disruptive technologies to address modern computing challenges, with the Intel-SiFive collaboration aiming to extend the RISC-V ecosystem. Compute blocks in future silicon chips, optimized for specific classes of workloads, require a vibrant market of semiconductor IP that is further enabled by SiFive's leading RISC-V processor IP optimized and available to customers of IFS. The open nature of the RISC-V instruction set architecture creates freedom to innovate, with specifications and extensions developed by expert contributors from leaders in the semiconductor industry, research institutions, and academia.

SiFive has partnered with IFS to develop a RISC-V development platform, codenamed "Horse Creek," featuring a multi-core SiFive Performance P550 processor, and implemented on the Intel 4 technology platform, on track for availability in 2022. The "Horse Creek" SoC will enable a new generation of RISC-V developer boards, continuing the tradition of SiFive HiFive boards that have helped drive the growth of the RISC-V ecosystem. To be informed of updates on the "Horse Creek" RISC-V developer board, please register here.

SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced the availability of the SiFive Performance P650 processor, the new range-topping member of the SiFive Performance family, which is expected to be the fastest licensable RISC-V processor IP core in the market. The SiFive Performance P650 will enable RISC-V designs for performance-demanding application processor markets from data center to edge, automotive, compute, mobile and more.

"SiFive's mission is to answer the semiconductor industry's call for more processor IP choices. SiFive is singularly focused on bringing innovative processor technology based on the RISC-V architecture to market," said Dr. Yunsup Lee, co-founder and CTO, SiFive. "Since the announcement of the Performance Series of RISC-V cores earlier this year, SiFive has continued to push the limits of what was previously possible with RISC-V. The SiFive Performance P650 processor IP represents our commitment towards relentless execution, delivering significant performance improvements in record time. This announcement is the next step towards our long-term vision of bringing RISC-V processors to all performance-hungry applications."

Back in June, SiFive, a company focusing on providing RISC-V-based IP solutions, received an offer for a takeover from Intel. With a value of over two billion dollars, the company's request was on the table to accept. However, according to the latest report from Bloomberg, SiFive declined an offer and aimed to get an initial public offering or get acquired by an even larger vendor. What made the company reject, you might question?

Well, according to sources familiar with the deal, Intel's offer of two billion USD was not enough, and it interrupted the company's ideologies of operation. SiFive management didn't like how Intel would integrate the company in its roadmaps and decided to stay independent. For now, the company is looking to start an initial public offering or get acquired an even larger company that would respect its vision and guidelines, unlike Intel's offer.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced launched the new SiFive Performance family of processors. The SiFive Performance family debuts with two new processor cores, the P270, SiFive's first Linux capable processor with full support for the RISC-V vector extension v1.0 rc, and the SiFive Performance P550 core, SiFive's highest performance processor to date. The new SiFive Performance P550 delivers a SPECInt 2006 score of 8.65/GHz, making it the highest performance RISC-V processor available today, and comparable to existing proprietary solutions in the application processor space.

"SiFive Performance is a significant milestone in our commitment to deliver a complete, scalable portfolio of RISC-V cores to customers in all markets who are at the vanguard of SOC design and are dissatisfied with the status quo," said Dr. Yunsup Lee, Co-Founder and CTO of SiFive. "These two new products cover new performance points and a wide range of application areas, from efficient vector processors that easily displace yesterday's SIMD architectures, to the bleeding edge that the P550 represents. SiFive is proud to set the standard for RISC-V processing and is ready to deliver these products to customers today."

SiFive, one of the hottest new semiconductor start-ups specializing in performance RISC-V processors, has received an offer for acquisition from Intel, for USD $2 billion, according to a Bloomberg report, citing sources close to the deal. SiFive was last valued at $500 million in 2020, when it was raising funds. SiFive is potentially benefiting from NVIDIA's ongoing acquisition of Arm, as the company has the ingredients to whip up high-performance processors based on the open-standard RISC-V machine architecture. Both SiFive and Intel declined to comment on the Bloomberg story.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced that Tenstorrent, an AI semiconductor and software start-up developing next-generation computers, will license the new SiFive Intelligence X280 processor in its AI training and inference processor. SiFive will deliver more details of its SiFive Intelligence initiative including the SiFive Intelligence X280 processor at the Linley Spring Processor Conference on April 23rd.

Tenstorrent's novel approach to inference and training effectively and efficiently accommodates the exponential growth in the size of machine learning models while offering best-in-class performance.

OpenFive, a leading provider of customizable, silicon-focused solutions with differentiated IP, today announced the successful tape out of a high-performance SoC on TSMC's N5 process, with integrated IP solutions targeted for cutting edge High Performance Computing (HPC)/AI, networking, and storage solutions.

The SoC features an OpenFive High Bandwidth Memory (HBM3) IP subsystem and D2D I/Os, as well as a SiFive E76 32-bit CPU core. The HBM3 interface supports 7.2 Gbps speeds allowing high throughput memories to feed domain-specific accelerators in compute-intensive applications including HPC, AI, Networking, and Storage. OpenFive's low-power, low-latency, and highly scalable D2D interface technology allows for expanding compute performance by connecting multiple dice together using an organic substrate or a silicon interposer in a 2.5D package.

RISC-V architecture is a relatively new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) developed at the University of California Berkeley. Starting as a "short, three-month project" the RISC-V ISA is a fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) ideology. A company working on this technology and helping to grow the ecosystem is SiFive. Today, they announced a big step forward for the ecosystem that will enable developers to make and optimize even more software for this architecture and platform. Called the HiFive Unmatched, the development board represents the first entry of RISC-V ISA to the world of personal computing, with its Mini-ITX form factor and PC-like connectors of power supply and I/O.

The board is home to SiFive's FU740 SoC, a five-core heterogeneous, coherent processor with four SiFive U74 cores, and one SiFive S7 core. This SoC is capable of smooth Linux OS operation, giving the developers a good platform to do their optimizations for. There is 8 GB of onboard DDR4 RAM (unknown frequencies and timing), a MicroSD card slot, and one PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slot for system storage. To connect the board to the outside world, you get one Gigabit Ethernet port. For user I/O there are four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports (1 Charging port) and one MicroUSB Console port. To power the board, you need a proper power supply with a 24-pin power connector. If you plan to build a PC based on the Unmatched board, you would need a standard ITX case, as it comes in the standard Mini-ITX (170x170 mm) form factor. For more information, please check out SiFive's website.

SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, today announced that Dr. Yunsup Lee, CTO of SiFive, and Dr. Krste Asanovic, Chief Architect of SiFive, will present at the technology industry's premier processor conference, the Linley Fall Virtual Processor Conference. The conference will be held on October 20th - 22nd and 27th - 29th, 2020 and will feature high-quality technical content from leading semiconductor companies worldwide.

"Industry demand for AI performance has skyrocketed over the last few years driven by rapid adoption from the data center to the edge. This year's Linley Fall Processor Conference will feature our biggest program yet and will introduce a host of new technology disclosures and product announcements of innovative processor architectures and IP technologies," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst and conference chairperson. "In spite of the challenges posed by the pandemic, development of these technologies continues to accelerate and we're excited to be sharing these presentations with a global audience via our live-streamed format."

SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, today announced it raised $61 million in a Series E round led by SK hynix, joined by new investor Prosperity7 Ventures, with additional funding from existing investors, Sutter Hill Ventures, Western Digital Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Intel Capital, Osage University Partners, and Spark Capital.

"Global demand for storage and memory in the data center is increasing as AI-powered business intelligence and data processing growth continues", said Youjong Kang, VP of Growth Strategy, SK hynix. "SiFive is well-positioned to grow with opportunities created from data center, enterprise, storage and networking requirements for workload-focused processor IP."

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ) and SiFive, Inc. announced today at GLOBALFOUNDRIES Technology Conference (GTC) in Taiwan that they are working to extend high DRAM performance levels with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2E) on GF's recently announced 12LP+ FinFET solution, with 2.5D packaging design services to enable fast time-to-market for Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications.

In order to achieve the capacity and bandwidth for data-intensive AI training applications, system designers are challenged with squeezing more bandwidth into a smaller area while maintaining a reasonable power profile. SiFive's customizable high bandwidth memory interface on GF's 12LP platform and 12LP+ solution will enable easy integration of high bandwidth memory into a single System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions to deliver fast, power-efficient data processing for AI applications in the computing and wired infrastructure markets.

You may never have heard of SiFive before -and that's perfectly understandable. The startup has just been brought from the ground-up following a round of funding, which netted it some $50.6 million dollars in the old, pre-ICO-preferred ways for funding: venture capital. The objective: to offer other startup companies a way to bring their idealized silicon into actual, custom silicon based on the RISC-V architecture, and then work with them towards achieving actual large-scale production.

The company will have available for customers options of IP and pre-baked designs which they can mix and match according to their needs, alongside small-scale production capability for companies to have their actual product - and test it in real-world conditions - before entering large-scale production. This move by SiFive aims to enable a larger variety of task-specific processor designs, ushering in a new, more liberal area of chip design and production.