The world’s highest performance RISC-V development board unlocks new opportunities for software developers to create the next era of RISC-V applications

SiFive event showcases how the RISC-V standard is driving AI innovation

Santa Clara, Calif., Aug. 30, 2024 — Today SiFive, Inc. announced that it has licensed its SiFive Automotive RISC-V IP cores to Arkmicro Technologies (Shenzhen), accelerating the adoption of RISC-V in automotive electronics. Arkmicro is a well-established chip company in the automotive industry, with products already certified and mass-produced by numerous international automotive companies. Arkmicro will integrate SiFive Automotive solutions into Arkmicro’s high-end automotive SoC chips.

SiFive Performance P870-D brings high compute density and scalability to datacenters, vehicles, and embedded systems

SiFive is seeing growing adoption, with more than two billion SiFive RISC-V based chips already in the market

Munich, Germany, June 25, 2024 – Today SiFive, Inc. the gold standard for RISC-V computing, is unveiling a major upgrade of its SiFive Essential product family at the RISC-V Summit Europe 2024. Developed over a decade, the field-proven Essential IP is already in use in billions of products including mobile phones, sensors, SSDs, FPGA platforms, surveillance cameras, smartwatches and more. This full-portfolio refresh brings higher performance, improved power efficiency and more flexible interfaces, with configuration and integration options to cover virtually any possibility. The SiFive Essential Gen4 products are available today.

“The best RISC-V embedded solutions just got much better with this fourth generation,” said John Ronco, SiFive SVP of Product. “With the benefits of cost-effective flexibility, performance and low power, RISC-V has won the battle for embedded. As legacy ISAs have reduced R&D and support, we are expanding SiFive’s broad portfolio of market leading Essential products and reaffirming our commitment and support for customers in these critical areas of innovation.”

SiFive has seen strong momentum across embedded segments where the Essential Gen4 products will bring impressive flexibility and features to enable customers to better tailor their designs. More than two billion SiFive RISC-V based chips for embedded devices have shipped to-date and the market continues to grow rapidly.

“The embedded space in 2024 represents a huge ($257 billion) market opportunity, growing with an 8.3% CAGR through 2030. RISC-V and SiFive have been increasingly gaining momentum and taking share from the other ISAs. SiFive is launching the products that these customers need while also innovating at the high performance and advanced AI levels,” said Rich Wawrzyniak, Principal Analyst at The SHD Group. “It is a mistake to discount the importance of embedded products as the flexibility and software portability of RISC-V makes designing products with multiple cores—including the highest performance cores—easier, creating a clear pathway for RISC-V into the next generations of high-performance chips.”

Essential Gen4 IP Portfolio Features:

• Broadest RISC-V CPU and system IP portfolio
• Up to 40% runtime power reduction
• 8 different baseline embedded 32-bit and 64-bit cores
• From 2 stage single-issue to 8 stage superscalar
• Improved L2 cache and enhanced L1 memory
• Extensive configuration and integration options
  • CPU type, profile and options
  • On-chip memories selection
  • System, peripheral and front ports
• Advanced power management and security
• Debug and trace
• Leading software support, including embedded Linux, FreeRTOS, Eclipse C/C++/ IDE

WHAT: SiFive (a gold sponsor) will be exhibiting at RISC-V Summit Europe from June 25-27, 2024 in Munich. At its booth, SiFive will be showing off its latest products, including SiFive’s new state-of-the-art RISC-V development board, the HiFive™ Premier P550. The highest performance RISC-V development board on the market, the HiFive Premier P550 offers developers unmatched flexibility and performance.

SiFive will also be giving three talks throughout the event, including a keynote from SiFive’s Krste Asanović discussing the incredible momentum of the RISC-V ecosystem across verticals. Additionally, SiFive will be sharing details on its newest Essential products, which are designed to optimize power and performance in a range of devices.

HiFive Premier P550 is the highest performance RISC-V development board on the market, offering developers unmatched flexibility and performance

Nuremberg, Germany – April 9, 2024 – 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.

“The popularity of our development boards underscores the growth and maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem,” said Patrick Little, CEO and Chairman at SiFive. “The HiFive board has always been the ‘golden reference’ RISC-V development platform. Building on this proven foundation with the new HiFive Premier P550, developers can take advantage of SiFive’s high-performance IP in a cost-efficient platform that will be available in volume, opening up unlimited possibilities for RISC-V innovation in AI applications and beyond.”

SiFive is collaborating with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, to ensure that developers can smoothly run the Linux distribution on the HiFive Premier P550. Ubuntu is free to use and comes with five years of free security maintenance for the operating system. Developers and innovators can rely on Ubuntu’s stable and secure platform to access the open source software ecosystem, and get access to bug fixes and security updates for 10+ years backed by Canonical’s enterprise-grade support.

“RISC-V is giving developers a new level of freedom to innovate, and SiFive is one of the top companies leading the charge. The availability of HiFive Premier P550 is a significant milestone for the RISC-V development community,” said Gordan Markuš, Silicon Alliances Director at Canonical. “Thanks to our collaboration with SiFive, developers using the HiFive Premier P550 board will be able to innovate at speed with Ubuntu. Additionally, Canonical’s software and services will accelerate time to market, and ensure long-term support and security maintenance for our enterprise partners.”

Technical Features

The Eswin EIC7700 SoC found on the board features a high performance 64-bit three-issue, out-of-order, SiFive RISC-V P550 core complex configured with four P550 cores, 256KB L2 cache and 4MB L3 cache. The SoC features a 2D/3D GPU, hardware video encoder/decoder, NPU, DSP, MIPI DSI, a security subsystem, an integrated high speed DDR5 memory controller, root complex PCI Express Gen 3 x4 and standard peripherals. Other features include:

SiFive’s Multi-Cluster, Multi-Cores P670 and X280 Power the Open Standard Platform for High-Performance AI Applications

Santa Clara, Calif., November 1, 2023 – Today, Sophgo announced that the company has licensed several SiFive RISC-V high performance processor cores, the SiFive Performance P670 and SiFive Intelligence X280 to develop RISC-V AI computing processors. Presented on SG2380 Kick-off Day at the Zhongguancun IC Park in Beijing, the new SiFive cores will be used in the upcoming, Sophgo SG2380.

The new Sophgo SG2380 is a 2.5 GHz 16-core RISC-V processor, utilizing the SiFive Performance P670 with a multi-cluster, multi-core configuration. It boasts high performance and RISC-V vector computation advantages. SG2380 also incorporates SiFive Intelligence X280 and a Vector Cooperative Processor Interface Extension (VCIX), integrating Sophgo's AI/ML hardware design. With complete software toolchain support from RISC-V, this coprocessor is targeting not only AI/ML but various advanced computing needs.

The P670, combined with RISC-V's unique instruction set architecture advantages and advanced microarchitecture design with silicon implementation by the SiFive team, offers high computational density and vector computation capabilities. Sophgo has also utilized the proven X280, paired with VCIX, as an NPU, highlighting the synergies between the two companies in this collaboration.

The SiFive P670 is currently the highest-performance and fully spec-compliant RISC-V commercial-grade processor IP (SpecINT2k6 exceeding 13/GHz) available in the market. SiFive offers multi-cluster, multi-core P670-compliant with RVA22, supporting the latest RISC-V specifications and operating systems, providing optimal performance and the lowest power consumption. The SiFive X280 offers flexibility and scalability in AI applications, supporting multi-core, multi-cluster configurations and numerous successful chip instances. The development tools and software support the latest OpenXLA framework, in line with the market demand and future application trends of AI.

For more information about Sophgo SG2380, please refer to CNX SOFTWARE – EMBEDDED SYSTEMS NEWS: Sophgo SG2380 – A 2.5 GHz 16-core SiFive P670 RISC-V processor with a 20 TOPS AI accelerator.

About SOPHGO

SOPHGO is committed to becoming the world's leading provider of universal computing power, focusing on the development and promotion of computing power products such as AI and RISC-V processors, following the ecological concept of full open source and openness, and working with ecological partners to create a full-scene product matrix covering "cloud, edge and endpoint". Provide computing products and overall solutions for Internet, Urban operations, Intelligent computing centers, General security, Intelligent manufacturing, and AIGC and other application scenarios. Our company has research and development centers in more than 10 cities in China such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Qingdao, Xiamen, as well as in countries such as the United States and Singapore. Since 2016, our brand's SOPHON series products have undergone multiple iterations, achieving significant improvements in energy efficiency compared to their predecessors in each generation.

SiFive’s Performance P870 and Intelligence X390 product debut sets new bar for high-performance compute in consumer, infrastructure, and automotive applications

Santa Clara, Calif., Oct. 11, 2023 –SiFive, Inc., the pioneer and leader of RISC-V computing today announced two new products designed to address new requirements for high performance compute. The SiFive Performance™ P870 and SiFive Intelligence™ X390 offer a new level of low power, compute density, and vector compute capability, and when combined provide the necessary performance boost for increasingly data intensive compute. Together, the new products create a powerful mix of scalar and vector computing to meet the needs of today’s dataflow and computation intensive AI applications across consumer, automotive, and infrastructure markets.

The announcement took place at an in-person press and analyst event in Santa Clara today, where the company also provided an update on several of its product lines currently shipping in silicon to customers around the world. Company executives offered insight into SiFive’s product roadmap and discussed how the overall RISC-V ecosystem continues to expand rapidly as new applications call for the benefits of RISC-V-based high-performance compute solutions.

“SiFive is leading the industry into a new era of high-performance RISC-V innovation, and closing the gap with other instruction set architectures with our unparalleled portfolio, while recent silicon tape-outs are demonstrating the tremendous benefits of SiFive RISC-V solutions,” said Patrick Little, SiFive Chairman, President and CEO. “As the Arm IPO showed, there is a fast-growing demand for semiconductors across many sectors, particularly processors for consumer and infrastructure markets. The flexibility of SiFive’s RISC-V solutions allows companies to address the unique computing requirements of these segments and capitalize on the momentum around generative AI, where we have seen double-digit design wins, and for other cutting-edge applications.

The SiFive Performance P870

Ideal for high performance consumer applications, or when used in conjunction with a vector processor in the datacenter, the P870 core sets an impressive new RISC-V performance bar across instruction set architecture availability, throughput, parallelism, and memory bandwidth. Bringing a 50% peak single thread performance upgrade (specINT2k6) over the previous generation SiFive Performance processors, the P870 is a six-wide out-of-order core, that meets RVA 23 and offers a shared cluster cache enabling up to a 32-core cluster. High execution throughput comes with more instruction sets per cycle, more ALU, and more branch units. The P870 is fully compatible with Google’s platform requirements for Android on RISC-V. The P870 also offers additional proven SiFive features: · x 128b VLEN RVV · Vector crypto and hypervisor extensions · IOMMU and AIA · Non-inclusive L3 cache · Proven RISC-V WorldGuard security

The SiFive Intelligence X390

Building on the highly popular SiFive Intelligence X280’s success in coupling AI/ML applications with hardware accelerators in mobile, infrastructure, and automotive applications, the new X390 brings a 4x improvement to vector computation with its single core configuration, doubled vector length, and dual vector ALUs. This allows quadruple the amount of sustained data bandwidth. With SiFive Vector Coprocessor Interface eXtension (VCIX) companies can easily add their own vector instructions and/or acceleration hardware, bringing unprecedented flexibility and allowing users to greatly increase performance with custom instructions. Features include: · 1024-bit VLEN, 512-bit DLEN · Single / Dual Vector ALU · VCIX (2048-bit out, 1024-bit in)

An Agile Hardware Solution for Generative AI applications

Bringing the P870 high-performance general compute SoC together with a high performance NPU cluster, consisting of the X390 and customer AI hardware engines, offers product designers a highly flexible, low power, and programmable solution with superior compute density for complex workloads.

The company highlighted how interest in these combined SiFive solutions is high, with a number of customers achieving silicon success and in various stages of commercialization using high performance products.

SiFive continues to actively work across the ecosystem (see attached quote sheet) with partners who are ensuring the software, security, and flexibility benefits of the open standard ecosystem are in place for SiFive processors as companies move to commercialize their SiFive-powered products.

Supporting quotations from industry partners:

SiFive has assembled an array of ecosystem partners to help customers speed their time to commercialization.

"We have collaborated with SiFive to deliver Cadence AI-driven digital full flow Rapid Adoption Kits (RAKs) for previous generation SiFive Performance™ and Intelligence™ RISC-V processors and are looking forward to producing them for the upcoming P870 and X390 processors" said KT Moore, vice president of Corporate Marketing, Cadence. "The RAKs utilize our leading Generative AI solutions that optimize power, performance and area while our system verification solutions enable optimal verification throughput and productivity. This empowers SiFive customers to accelerate time-to-market, enhance product quality, and deliver innovative solutions for high-performance computing, AI, automotive, and mobile applications."

“Canonical’s strategic alliance with SiFive, a RISC-V CPU IP leader, grants us exclusive privileges, including early access to their cutting-edge processors under development. Canonical has ported Ubuntu to SiFive development systems in the past and is working to have Ubuntu ready at launch with the SiFive HiFive Pro P550 and future platforms,” said Cindy Goldberg, Vice President, Silicon Alliances at Canonical. “We see a growing demand for SiFive RISC-V processors and recognize the opportunity across consumer, automotive and infrastructure markets. Ubuntu is the operating system of choice for infrastructure and cloud use cases. This year with the introduction of Ubuntu Pro we have enhanced security, compliance and support coverage across a broad portfolio of open source software and platform architectures. The combination of SiFive’s RISC-V IP and Canonical’s software is a combination that will lead the transformative future in computing, on RISC-V.”

“As an early RISC-V adopter and industry leader for delivering production-proven, safety-certified development tools, C/C+ compilers and operating systems for RISC-V, Green Hills Software is excited to be expanding its close working relationship with SiFive by adding optimized support for the P870 and X390.” said Dan Mender, VP of Business Development at Green Hills Software. “Together, Green Hills and SiFive will help companies realize the maximum performance, power, and area benefit possible for these new SiFive offerings.”

“IAR welcomes the new SiFive Performance P870 and Intelligence X390 RISC-V processors and recognizes their opportunity for generative AI and ML as well as high-performance computing applications addressing consumer, automotive, and infrastructure. IAR and SiFive have a strong partnership and stand out in the RISC-V ecosystem. SiFive enables IAR with early access its leading commercial RISC-V IP processors while they are under development, enabling co-optimizations benefiting mutual customers. IAR’s complete development solution for all the leading RISC-V core IP from SiFive helps embedded software developers around the world maximize the energy efficiency, simplicity, security, and flexibility upsides that RISC-V and SiFive offer, like the latest additions for Generative AI/ML applications.”

WHAT: SiFive will be onsite at the RISC-V Summit China, scheduled for Aug. 23 – 25, 2023 in Beijing. Hosted in partnership with RISC-V International and the Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip (BOSC), SiFive will deliver two keynotes on the future of RISC-V and the latest on SiFive’s high-performance RISC-V processors. SiFive will also host a series of technical sessions focused on RISC-V vectors, ML compilers, hibernation, and more.

At the event, SiFive experts can speak to the company’s broad Core IP portfolio, spanning from high-performance application processors to area-optimized, low-power embedded 64- and 32-bit microcontrollers, to vector processors designed for modern compute requirements and artificial intelligence (AI), and optimized for the specific needs of the automotive industry.

At RISC-V Summit China, global innovators will share technical and business innovation around RISC-V. The summit features a multi-track conference, tutorials, exhibitions and poster sessions. There will be real-time Chinese to English translations for in-person and virtual attendees.

In-person and virtual attendees are encouraged to check out SiFive’s speaking sessions:

Wednesday, 23 August: • 15:20: KEYNOTE: The RISC-V Future is Unlimited: China’s Role with Yunsup Lee • 17:00: KEYNOTE: It Just Keeps Getting Better: RISC-V Processor Performance with Jack Kang

Friday, 25 August: • 09:50: The Story of Getting RISC-V Vector in Linux with Andy Chiu and Zong Li • 14:10: Discovering the RVV C Intrinsics v1.0 with Eop Chen and Kito Cheng • 14:30: Software Components and Methodology for Designing and Optimizing RISC-V ML Compilers – A 3-Year Lesson of Collaboration With OpenXLA with Hong-Rong Hsu and Pen Li • 16:40: Accelerating the Migration from Arm Neon to RISC-V Vectors with Han-Kuan Chen

WHO: SiFive

The open WorldGuard model provides a system-level approach to securing RISC-V designs

Santa Clara, Calif., May 24, 2023 – SiFive, Inc., the pioneer and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced the company is giving the WorldGuard security model to RISC-V International, providing the RISC-V community with a uniform way to secure their designs and bring them to market faster. RISC-V International is the non-profit home of the open standard RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), related specifications, and stakeholder community which has more than 3,570 RISC-V members across 70 countries.

WorldGuard makes it easy for developers to enable a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on RISC-V platforms. As a hardware-enhanced software isolation solution, WorldGuard provides protection against improper access to memory or devices by software applications and other bus initiators (such as DMAs). Designers can quickly create domains, also known as “worlds,” for isolated code execution and data protection. WorldGuard doesn't break the RISC-V ISA and doesn't require new instructions to be used. It simply adds secure metadata to the transactions issued by the various bus initiators and checks permissions against an Access Control List (ACL) at the destination, whether it's memory or a peripheral. The isolation is based on multiple levels of privilege for each world, offering robust SoC-level information control.

“Robust security is fundamental to every silicon design, but many of the latest security solutions are out of reach for developers,” said Dany Nativel, Senior Director, Product Marketing at SiFive. “From the start, our WorldGuard security model was open and freely accessible for developers to secure their designs at a system level. By donating WorldGuard to RISC-V International, we hope that even more developers will take advantage of it so the entire RISC-V ecosystem can benefit.”

WorldGuard provides an open, system-level approach to securing access to system resources (memory and peripherals) by software applications. This approach is ideal for creating multiple trusted environments, enabling a Trusted Computing Base (TCB) where the highest level of trust is limited to the secure ROM boot, the Machine-mode firmware, the secure applications, and the Operating Systems (OSs) that implement them. This base of trust is also referred to as the “Trusted Agent.”

“One of the biggest advantages of RISC-V is the active community that is committed to sharing resources and collaborating. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel, developers can use open tools like WorldGuard to ensure their products are secure and speed up time-to-market,” said Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International. “We appreciate SiFive’s donation of WorldGuard as we all work together to secure the future of RISC-V innovation.”

Ongoing development of WorldGuard will now be managed by RISC-V International. SiFive will continue to contribute its expertise and resources.

About SiFive As the pioneers who introduced RISC-V to the world, SiFive is transforming the future of compute by bringing the limitless potential of RISC-V to the highest performance and most data-intensive applications in the world. SiFive’s unrivaled compute platforms have enabled leading technology companies around the world to innovate, optimize and deliver the most advanced solutions of tomorrow across every market segment of chip design, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, data center, mobile, and consumer. With SiFive, the future of RISC-V has no limits. For more information, please visit SiFive.com.

Media Contacts Allison DeLeo Racepoint Global for SiFive SiFive@racepointglobal.com Tel.: +1(415) 694-6711

Highlights leadership in RISC-V and proven performance and power density benefits

San Jose, Calif., Dec. 13, 2022 – At the RISC-V Summit today, SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, celebrated its impressive year of growth and technical achievements. In 2022 SiFive announced collaborations with some of the world’s largest chip companies and hyperscale datacenters, as the company has been laser-focused on expanding growth. Today SiFive has design wins with more than 100 customers, including 8 of the top 10 semiconductor companies, in applications including automotive, AR/VR, client computing, datacenter, and the intelligent edge. This year the company rolled out new products for a range of fast-growing and high-volume markets, including a comprehensive automotive portfolio, and expanded its presence globally. This momentum was recognized last week when SiFive was awarded the prestigious 2022 Most Respected Private Semiconductor Company Award by the Global Semiconductor Alliance GSA.

“This was a standout year for SiFive, as we collaborated with some of the biggest companies on the planet to tackle their unmet needs, shifted our portfolio and revenues from embedded to high performance RISC-V products that are shaking up the industry, and expanded our global footprint,” said Patrick Little, CEO and Chairman at SiFive. “With the fast-paced growth of SiFive and rapidly increasing demand for our products, and the overall growth of the RISC-V ecosystem, as we’ve said before, the future of RISC-V ‘has no limits’ as we take the company to new heights.”

SiFive has made incredible technical progress over the last year, rolling out several products with unparalleled compute performance and efficiency. The new SiFive Performance™ P670 and P470 RISC-V processors raise the bar for innovative designs in high volume applications like wearables, smart home, industrial automation, AR/VR, and other consumer devices. The company introduced its SiFive Automotive™ E6-A, X280-A, and S7-A solutions to address critical needs for current and future applications like infotainment, cockpit, connectivity, ADAS, and electrification. Plus, SiFive enhanced its popular SiFive Intelligence™ X280 processor IP to meet the accelerated demand for vector processing, especially for AI and ML applications.

The company has continued to deepen its collaborations and partnerships as it works to transform the future of compute and define what comes next. Through partnership with Microchip, SiFive is a part of NASA’s next generation High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor, which delivers a 100x increase in computational capability to help propel next-generation planetary and surface missions. Additionally, the X280 processor with the new SiFive Vector Coprocessor Interface Extension (VCIX) is being used as the AI Compute Host to provide flexible programming in a leading datacenter. SiFive also announced its work with companies including BrainChip, Kinara (Deep Vision), Synopsys, and ProvenRun, as well as a broad set of OS, Software Tools, and EDA ecosystem processors for the SiFive Automotive Family of processors

Another big milestone for SiFive is the company’s partnership with Intel to spark innovation in high-performance RISC-V platforms. SiFive is supporting Intel Foundry Services (IFS) Innovation Fund’s goal to build innovative new multi-ISA computing platforms including RISC-V platforms optimized for Intel process technology. The IFS Innovation 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. At the show, the companies unveiled more details about the HiFive Pro P550 Development System (code named Horse Creek); this high-performance development system will enable the RISC-V ecosystem to productively create software when it is commercially available later in 2023.

SiFive’s stellar growth, technical achievements, and partnerships have been recognized by prestigious organizations. In addition to the recent GSA Awards recognition, SiFive was awarded a 2022 TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Partner of the Year award. Additionally, SiFive ranked in the top 10 percent of Inc.’s fastest growing private companies in America list.

To meet the strong customer demand for SiFive’s innovative RISC-V IP, SiFive has expanded its headcount to more than 550 employees and has opened new offices around the world, including a Research & Development (R&D) Center in Cambridge, United Kingdom, a design center in Bangalore, India, and a new office in Hyderabad, India..

At the RISC-V Summit, taking place from Dec. 12-15 in San Jose, Calif. and virtually, SiFive is presenting in more than 10 sessions, including a keynote on Dec. 13 at 10:35 a.m. PT with SiFive’s CEO Patrick Little: “RISC-V Spotlight: Delivering on Real-World Customer Challenges.” To learn more about SiFive’s business, stop by the SiFive booth in the RISC-V Summit Expo Hall.

About SiFive As the pioneers who introduced RISC-V to the world, SiFive is transforming the future of compute by bringing the limitless potential of RISC-V to the highest performance and most data-intensive applications in the world. SiFive’s unrivaled compute platforms have enabled leading technology companies around the world to innovate, optimize and deliver the most advanced solutions of tomorrow across every market segment of chip design, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, data center, mobile, and consumer. With SiFive, the future of RISC-V has no limits. For more information, please visit SiFive.com.

Stay current with the latest SiFive updates via Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

Santa Clara, Calif., November 3, 2022 - SiFive, Inc. the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced it has received the 2022 TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Partner of the Year award, in the Emerging IP Company category. Dr. L.C Lu, TSMC fellow and vice president of design and technology platform, presented the distinguished award to SiFive executives at the recent TSMC 2022 OIP Ecosystem Forum in Santa Clara, CA. The recognition reflects the ongoing innovation and collaboration between the two companies that is furthering the momentum of RISC-V.

The Partner of the Year award honors TSMC OIP ecosystem partners' pursuit of excellence in next-generation silicon enablement over the past year.

“OIP Partner of the Year award-winning companies work relentlessly to achieve the highest standards of design, development, and technology implementation to accelerate silicon innovation,” said Dan Kochpatcharin, Head of Design Infrastructure Management Division at TSMC. “SiFive’s partnership with TSMC and leadership in the RISC-V architecture enable our mutual customers to achieve next-generation design innovation for key spaces, such as HPC, mobile, and automotive.”

“The global SiFive team is honored to be recognized with this prestigious TSMC award for our partnership, RISC-V leadership, and continued innovation,” said Yunsup Lee, Co-founder and CTO. “This award reflects the importance both companies place on our long-term innovation partnership and the great work by teams in both companies. SiFive offers leading power and area efficiencies in a modern architecture supported by the global RISC- V ecosystem, and working with TSMC we are able to do so on the most advanced process nodes and together help proliferate RISC-V.”

Next generation P670 and P470 RISC-V Processors bring ultimate flexibility and balance of performance and efficiency for next-generation wearables and smart consumer devices

Santa Clara, Calif., November 1, 2022 - 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.”

"We are excited to see RISC-V solutions for wearable and consumer devices becoming a reality, and we are looking at possibilities of integrating SiFive’s latest products into Snapdragon platforms,” said Ziad Asghar, Vice President, Product Management- Snapdragon Technologies and Roadmap at Qualcomm.

"Samsung’s System LSI Business holds a wide portfolio of solutions for various applications, such as mobile, wearables and other consumer devices. We look forward to evaluating how the latest RISC-V innovations from SiFive can enhance our offerings,” said Jinpyo Park, VP of the Innovative AP Development Team, Samsung Electronics System LSI Business.

“SiFive continues to be a market leader in the growing and maturing RISC-V space and again shows its leadership with its new SiFive Performance P670 and P470 RISC-V processors,” said Todd R. Weiss, an analyst with Futurum Research. “These latest and powerful new processors give SiFive feature and performance advantages that will gain plenty of attention from device makers and consumers who want more from their devices. SiFive has been growing its reputation for some time and is truly ready to shake up the marketplace.”

Features

The SiFive Performance P470 and P670 products offer a finely-tuned combination of compute-density, power efficiency, and robust feature sets ideal for a wide range of applications and markets:

• Support for virtualization, including a separate IOMMU for accelerating virtualized device IO

• Full, Out-of-Order, RISC-V Vector implementation, based on the ratified RISC-V Vector v1.0 Specification

• First to market with the RISC-V Vector Cryptography extensions

• SiFive WorldGuard system security

• Full RISC-V RVA22 profile compliance

• New, Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) compliant interrupt controller, with better support for Message Signal Interrupts (MSI) and virtualization

• Enhanced scalability with fully coherent multi-core, multi-cluster, with support for up to 16 cores

SiFive Performance P670

The P670 is ideal for applications like premium wearables, networking, robotics, and mobile. The P650, which excludes the vector unit, is already shipping to lead customers and is being used in applications that do not require the additional capabilities that vector compute offers or are more area constrained.

The feature rich P670:

• achieves a maximum frequency exceeding 3.4GHz in 5nm,

• has performance of greater than 12 SpecINT2k6/GHz, offering optimized performance in a constrained area and power envelope,

• offers higher single threaded performance and 2x compute density compared to legacy solutions, and

• includes a 2x 128-bit Vector ALUs compliant with the ratified RISC-V Vector v1.0 specification

SiFive Performance P470

The P470 is SiFive’s first efficiency-focused Out-of-Order, area optimized, vector processor, ideal for applications like wearables, consumer, and smart home devices. Expanding on the proven P500-Series, the P470 is significantly smaller than competing solutions and optimized to have best-in-class performance efficiency and area density. The P470 was designed to also serve as a companion to the P670 processor for demanding applications that require a sharing of compute resources while optimizing power consumption.

The P470 offers a significant upgrade to legacy efficiency cores, achieving a maximum frequency exceeding 3.4GHz in 5nm, and greater than 8 SpecINT2k6/GHz, within a minimal area and power envelope.

Other P470 features include:

• 4x compute density in comparison to leading competitor

• Includes 1x 128-bit RISC-V Vector ALU compliant with the ratified RISC-V Vector v1.0 specification

SiFive will also release the P450 – an area-optimized version of the P470 that excludes the Vector Unit.

A presentation highlighting the benefits of the new products will be made at the Linley Fall Microprocessor Conference later today.

For more information on SiFive’s market-leading RISC-V IP portfolio, please visit SiFive.com/risc-v-core-ip.

New Synopsys Fusion QuickStart Implementation Kits Deliver Enhanced Power, Performance and Area for SiFive RISC-V Processors

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., October 25, 2022 – SiFive and Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) today announced their new collaboration to accelerate the design and verification of SiFive RISC-V processor-based SoCs. The collaboration provides mutual customers with Synopsys Fusion QuickStart Implementation Kits (QIKs) that optimize the power, performance and area (PPA) of SiFive’s Intelligence™ X280 and Performance™ P550 processor cores. Synopsys Fusion QIKs for SiFive processors leverage the Synopsys Fusion Compiler™ RTL-to-GDSII product and Synopsys Design Space Optimization (DSO.ai™), which autonomously explores multiple design spaces to enhance PPA metrics. By using the implementation scripts and reference guides included in the QIKs, designers can accelerate the development of their SiFive processor-based SoCs.

“As we push the performance of application-specific processors, our collaboration with Synopsys enables us to deliver higher quality, PPA-optimized RISC-V solutions that meet and beat our customers’ compute goals,” said Yunsup Lee, co-founder and CTO at SiFive. “Synopsys has early access to SiFive’s processors under development, enabling the companies co-optimize the processors and Synopsys’ tools. This collaboration delivers Synopsys Fusion QIKs for mutual customers to quickly achieve their challenging design targets for their specific application requirements. We look to extend our collaboration to include verification flows, as well as Foundation and Interface IP.”

“The trend towards application-specific silicon is helping to address the intensive compute demands of advanced high-performance systems,” Sanjay Bali, vice president of Marketing and Strategy for the EDA Group at Synopsys. “Our collaboration with SiFive to provide Synopsys Fusion QIKs enables designers to achieve the optimal quality-of-results for their custom RISC-V-based SoCs.”

Fusion QIKs for SiFive X280 and P550 processors are available for download today through Synopsys SolvNetPlus.

Collaborating to Achieve Design Targets Quickly and Confidently In addition to the Fusion QIKs, SoC designers using SiFive RISC-V processors can take advantage of key Synopsys technologies, including: • The Synopsys Digital Design Family, which provides a framework to achieve optimum PPA across all leading technology processes via a shared engine for implementation, test and signoff of power-optimized architectures for SiFive cores. • The family also includes Synopsys Silicon Lifecycle Management Family optimization software, which enables SiFive users to quickly find the best configurations of their software stack to maximize performance of SiFive cores. • The Synopsys Verification Family, which speeds software development, verification throughput and time-to-market for SiFive based designs, including virtual prototyping with models of SiFive’s cores, simulation, formal verification, hardware and software debug, emulation, FPGA prototyping and verification IP. • The silicon-proven Synopsys Interface IP products for the most widely used protocols, which deliver the required low latency, high performance, power efficiency and security for data-intensive systems implementing the latest SiFive processor cores.

Paris, France, September 27, 2022 – ProvenRun, a global leader in embedded security, today announced the availability of its flagship secure OS / TEE product called ProvenCore, integrated with SiFive® WorldGuard technology, providing powerful SoC-level mechanism for software isolation.

Modern microprocessor SoCs are designed to reduce cost by housing all functionality in a single device. This race for more features, which inevitably increases the size of the code and introduces pieces of code from multiple origins, can lead to security risks when one vulnerable piece of code can affect another, intentionally or not. Add to this the significant increase in the device's interactions with the environment, which greatly increases the attack surface, and it makes sense to develop solutions that can guarantee that the failure of one part of the software does not affect the correct and complete functioning of other software running on the same platform.

SiFive is the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture. As part of their open platform secure architecture called SiFive Shield, SiFive offers the SiFive WorldGuard solution to enable Trusted Execution Environment on its RISC-V platforms. SiFive WorldGuard is a hardware-enhanced software isolation solution that provides protection against improper access to memory or devices by software applications and other initiators (such as DMAs). WorldGuard enables designers to create domains, also known as “worlds,” for isolated code execution and data protection. The isolation is based on multiple levels of privilege for each world, to offer SoC-level information control.

The WorldGuard solution provides a system-level approach to securing access to system resources (memory, peripherals) by software applications. This approach is ideal for creating a trusted environment, enabling a Trusted Computing Base (TCB) where the highest level of trust is limited to the secure ROM boot, the Machine-mode firmware, the secure applications, and the OperatingSystems (OSs) that implement them. This base of trust is also referred to as the “Trusted Agent.”

ProvenCore is a secure OS developed by ProvenRun using deductive formal method, to guarantee security properties such as integrity, confidentiality, correctness, and isolation in order to get as close as possible to zero defect, leaving almost no attack surface for hackers. ProvenCore is resilient against the most sophisticated attacks and has received a Common Criteria EAL7 certification. It is a key component for being able to develop security services with a high security assurance level in a cost-effective way. These security services include key services for establishing a Root of Trust (key management service (secure storage), cryptographic operation services, TRNG) but can also address advanced use cases such as Secure Firmware Update, Runtime Integrity Monitoring, Trusted UI, and more.

Using ProvenCore as a “trusted agent” in a WorldGuard configuration achieves best-in-class security for RISC-V architectures, for a scalable and flexible solution with a well-identified and auditable TCB that will meet all security requirements, up to the highest. The implementation of ProvenCore with SiFive WorldGuard can be done by dedicating a core for security, or by isolating two software domains using the same core. The latter is referred to as Trusted Execution Environment, where ProvenCore will coexist with a Rich environment on the same core. A secure monitor will ensure the coordination between the two environments while maintaining the isolation.

“Combining ProvenRun ProvenCore software and SiFive WorldGuard hardware is the best way to address system-level hardware and software isolation with a certifiable solution,” said Chris Jones, VP Products at SiFive.

ProvenRun also offers a variety of services to help device makers securing products for their entire life cycle: • Consulting services such as risk analysis, security architecture definition, certification support, and secure provisioning • Engineering services such as secure boot implementation and security applications development (cryptographic operation, key management, secure firmware update…)

ABOUT PROVENRUN ProvenRun’s mission is to provide customers with the Trusted Products and Services that will help them Embed Security within their infrastructure of connected devices wherever this is required, at the chip, device, edge or cloud levels. With our security consulting services and secure-by-design off-the-shelf product solutions, we resolve the security challenges arising from the IoT revolution while dramatically improving the protection against remote cyberattacks. For more information, www.provenrun.com

SiFive introduces Automotive E6-A, X280-A, and S7-A products and long-term roadmap

SiFive X280 delivers 100x increase in computational capability with leading power efficiency, fault tolerance, and compute flexibility to propel next-generation planetary and surface missions

San Mateo, Calif., September 6, 2022 - SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced it is providing 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 a multiple SiFive® Intelligence™ X280 RISC-V vector core, with 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 chosen as part of the most mission critical applications for the World's premier world space agency,” 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.”

The SiFive X280 is a multi-core capable RISC-V processor with vector extensions and SiFive Intelligence Extensions and is optimized for AI/ML compute at the edge. The X280 is ideal for applications requiring high-throughput, single-thread performance while under significant power constraints. The X280 has demonstrated a 100x increase in compute capabilities compared to today’s space computers. In scientific and space workloads, the X280 provides several orders of magnitude improvement compared to competitive CPU solutions.

The open and collaborative nature of RISC-V will allow the broad academic and scientific software development community to contribute and develop scientific applications and algorithms, as well optimizing the many math functions, filters, transforms, neural net libraries, and other software libraries, as part of a robust and long-term software ecosystem.

The HPSC processor and X280 compute subsystem is expected to be useful to other government agencies in a variety of applications including industrial automation, edge computing, ratification intelligence, and aerospace applications.

For more information on SiFive’s market-leading RISC-V IP portfolio and how it is well-suited for Aerospace and Defense applications, please visit SiFive.com.

Leading RISC-V innovator investing in people, community, and Cambridge, with plans to hire more than 100 within two years

Leading performance for AI inference, Image Processing, and Datacenter applications driving double-digit design wins

$175M Series F Investment Led by Coatue Validates Relentless Pursuit of Processor Innovation

Intel Innovation Fund Combines with SiFive RISC-V Leadership, IP, and Experience to Enable Custom SoC Design

Deep Vision licenses SiFive Intelligence X280 processor to deliver greater flexibility and AI inference pre-processing for many markets