Bob Monkman (SiFive), with Bill Lamie (PX5) and Rafael Taubinger (IAR)

You are invited to attend an upcoming webinar where Ansys will talking with SiFive's Phil Dworsky to discuss the pursuit of maximum compute density in our RISC-V processor cores.

In March, SiFive announced the opening of its new office in the greater Boston area. 2022 was a monumental year for SiFive and 2023 is shaping up to be another strong year. Marlborough was an ideal location for the new office as the company continues to expand its footprint and serve our growing customer base located in Massachusetts and the surrounding Northeast region.

The office will be led by Shubu Mukherjee, vice president of architecture at SiFive, with plans to grow its headcount in the next 12-to-24 months. The greater Boston area is rich in talent in all areas of semiconductor development, including architecture, RTL, digital verification, and physical design, as well as sales, marketing, and business development. Having a physical presence in the area will help reach both experienced professionals as well as tap into the strong University programs in the region.

SiFive is always seeking talented designers and engineers ready to make an impact on the world and help accelerate the adoption of RISC-V. You can always check our website for open roles. Careers

As the inventors of RISC-V and performance density leaders, SiFive is committed to spreading the word about how this groundbreaking open architecture is reshaping the computing industry and ushering in new possibilities. Last week, we hosted the SiFive Tech Forum in Hsinchu, the technology heart of Taiwan, to bring together hardware engineers, developers, and other technology leaders to talk about the incredible momentum of RISC-V to-date and how SiFive is leading the RISC-V revolution. The event was well over subscribed, which highlighted the eagerness with which the attendees were keen to learn about the latest SiFive solutions. Read on to find out more about what we covered during the SiFive Tech Forum. And you can view the presentations here

SiFive is in attending 2023’s embedded world from March 14-16, and we’d love to see you there! Meet us in Nürnberg to learn about some of our recent announcements, including our new processors for wearables. These new processors, the P670 and P470, offer unrivaled choice and flexibility with the perfect balance of performance and efficiency. The P670 is ideal for applications like premium wearables, networking, robotics, and mobile. Meanwhile, the P470 – SiFive’s first efficiency-focused Out-of-Order, area optimized, vector processor – is designed for applications like wearables, consumer, and smart home devices.

In case you missed it, we also recently introduced new automotive processors. SiFive’s Automotive X280-A, E6-A, and S7-A solutions address critical needs for current and future automotive applications like infotainment, cockpit, connectivity, ADAS, and electrification. The X280-A (the automotive version of SiFive’s X280 vector processor) has industry-leading performance to meet the complex computing requirements of sensor fusion and ML intensive workloads. The E6-A series is designed for real-time, 32-bit applications including system control, hardware security modules (HSMs), and safety islands, and also serves as a standalone solution for microcontrollers. Additionally, the S7-A is a 64-bit, high-performance real-time core optimized for the needs of modern SoCs with performant safety islands.

Let us know if you’d like to set up a meeting to learn more about these new products and how the open era of computing is transforming the semiconductor industry. SiFive saw record growth in 2022 driven by global demand for RISC-V and a growing awareness of it's compute density and power efficiency advantages. We work closely with more than 100 leading customers in applications including automotive, AR/VR, client computing, datacenter, and the intelligent edge. To set up a meeting, please contact sifive@racepointglobal.com.

At the 2022 RISC-V Summit, SiFive highlighted collaborations with some of the world’s biggest companies in our 10+ talks on stage and with our demos. SiFive also gave an exclusive first look at an upcoming product, and three of our employees won awards.

One highlight was the keynote from SiFive’s CEO, Patrick Little: “RISC-V Spotlight: RISC-V Everyone Wins”. Patrick highlighted how the momentum and excitement for RISC-V is growing and how today it is in billions of cores on the market and is being designed into a huge range of applications. Patrick covered the early vision for RISC-V and emphasized the importance of collaborating to build a strong community and ecosystem for RISC-V.

As part of our efforts to build out the RISC-V ecosystem, SiFive has partnered with Intel to develop the HiFive Pro P550 Development System (previously code-named Horse Creek). During his keynote, Patrick was joined on stage by Intel Foundry Services’ Bob Brennan to share a first look at this high performance platform that features a quad-core SiFive Performance™ P550 processor and is implemented in the Intel 4 technology platform. The board will enable a new generation of RISC-V software, continuing the tradition of SiFive HiFive boards that have helped drive the growth of the RISC-V ecosystem. The board will be commercially available in the summer of 2023.

SiFive ecosystem partners and customers, including Ashling, AWS, Canonical Ubuntu, Codeplay, Google, Imperas, Intel, Lauterbach, Microchip, Qualcomm, Rice University, Solid Sands, Synopsys, and Tenstorrent, were featured throughout the event and in a panel session entitled “It takes a village… to build an ecosystem,” which reviewed the strong state of the RISC-V ecosystem as well as the next steps that key contributors are leading.

SiFive’s additional presentations throughout the event focused on our collaborations and partnerships to bring our high-performance RISC-V portfolio to automotive, aerospace, and beyond. For example, through our 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. Jack Kang, SVP, Biz Dev, CX, Corp Marketing at SiFive, summed up why so many companies are choosing RISC-V and SiFive: “RISC-V products are just better. Better power, better performance, and more.”

Jack also took some time to chat with RISC-V International’s CEO Calista Redmond about our momentum to-date and what’s ahead.

SiFive continues to invest strongly in the RISC-V community, with many of our employees actively participating in RISC-V International’s technical committees. In recognition of these efforts, three of SiFive’s employees won awards from RISC-V International. Yunsup Lee, SiFive’s Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, received a Technical Contributor Award for his work as Chair of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). Craig Topper, Principal Compiler Engineer, and Kito Cheng, Compiler Engineer, received Software Contributor Awards for their hard work on RISC-V technical committees. Check out the full list of winners here.

You can read more about SiFive’s latest activities and momentum in 2022 here. To watch SiFive’s presentations at the RISC-V Summit, visit here.

SiFive has seen tremendous growth over the past few years with strong year-over-year revenue growth and is in the top 10% of the Inc. 5000 list of private companies. With more than 550 employees around the world, we’re continuing to grow our team and expand our footprint across different regions to meet the strong customer demand for SiFive’s innovative RISC-V IP.

India is one region in particular where we’re focused on building out our team. This month SiFive opened a new design center in Bangalore, India. We have around 90 employees working there currently, and the space has room for around 150 employees as we continue to grow. The Bangalore team is focused on leading edge CPU and platform design, verification, physical implementation and software.

In the fast moving Semiconductor Industry, predictions and papers become obsolete fast and so it’s worth recognizing when a paper has a significant impact on our industry that also has a bit of a timeless nature. The paper, A systematic methodology to compute the architectural vulnerability factors for a high-performance microprocessor (you can read it here was recognized during the award ceremony at MICRO 22 in Chicago October 4th, and we’re proud to share that our very own VP of Architecture, Shubu Mukherjee, (who was at Intel at the time it was written) was there to accept the award on behalf of his fellow authors, Christopher Weaver, Joel Emer, Steve Reinhardt and Todd Austin.

At the AI Hardware Summit in Santa Clara, September 14th, Krste Asanovic, SiFive Co-Founder and Chief Architect, took to the stage with Cliff Young, Google TPU Architect and MLPerf Co-Founder, to reveal how the latest SiFive Intelligence™ X280 processor with the new SiFive Vector Coprocessor Interface Extension (VCIX) is being used as the AI Compute Host to provide flexible programming combined with the Google MXU (systolic matrix multiplier) accelerator in the datacenter. They also talked about why this type of architecture is becoming popular for AI/ML workloads, and how, with this configuration, SiFive provides essential compute capabilities so Google can focus on deep learning SOC development. A video of the talk is expected to be available in early October.

The Next SiFive Revolution

As SiFive announces its long-term plans to meet the rapidly changing needs of the automotive markets, this blog explores the many advantages the SiFive Automotive™ portfolio brings across a wide range of current and future applications, including; electrification, cockpit, ADAS, safety, and others. Our power efficient, flexible and high-performance cores are ideally suited for the most critical applications, and are of course, supported by the global RISC-V ecosystem.

In June 2022, SiFive released an enhanced version of the market-leading SiFive® Intelligence™ X280 processor to take a further leap in performance for AI inference, image processing, and datacenter applications.

With the 2021 launch of the SiFive® Intelligence™ X280, SiFive was the first company to release a RISC-V Vector 1.0 product, and it took the market by storm. The X280 has quickly achieved market-leading success, with design wins across a number of high performance applications including AI inference, Image Processing, and Datacenter applications. Customers include a U.S. government agency working on next generation aerospace/defense standards, a tier #1 global mobile image processor supplier, and a tier #1 global hyperscaler for AI, and the list grows daily..

If you haven’t seen it, SiFive is ranked in the top 10 percent of Inc.’s annual list Here of the fast-growing private companies in America which includes a wide range of industries. This ranking is a direct reflection of our impressive revenue growth the past three years and our momentum, forward trajectory, and leadership in the processor IP market. By the numbers, SiFive is ranked No. 413 overall, and we are excited to rank an impressive second (No. 2) in computer hardware.

Cambridge, with a long history of innovation and invention and a thriving tech ecosystem, is an obvious choice as a location for SiFive to continue its global expansion. We’re all about attracting the best talent, anywhere, and part of our mission and values is to also give back to, and be an active participant in the communities where we do business. As we expand in Cambridge we found a great partner with Cambridge United Football Club and this week announced our sponsorship as part of a week-long celebration. See the promotional video Here

SiFive is the market leader in RISC-V Vector processors with the flagship SiFive vector processor, the SiFive Intelligence X280, leading the charge as a clear favorite with customers, with solutions being designed into a broad range of applications ranging from computer vision, mobile ISP, Edge AI, to datacenter AI.

After describing the current 2022 broad SiFive Performance, Intelligence, and Essential Processor Product portfolio, this webinar introduction to the SiFive vector processors begins by identifying some of the challenges that exist for system designers and subsequent evolving application trends.

SiFive is the market leader in RISC-V Vector processors and has gained significant market traction, with solutions being designed into a broad range of applications ranging from computer vision, mobile ISP, Edge AI, to datacenter AI.

A great way to get to know more about popular SiFive vector processors, which are compatible with the RISC-V Vector (RVV) version 1.0 specification

The RISC-V revolution continues to advance as the technology industry embraces open computing to address semiconductor design and business challenges

SiFive joins the Intel Foundry Services IP Alliance program to broadly enable innovative new computing platforms

SiFive is aiming high with bold new technology for performance-driven applications

The RISC-V Summit 2021 highlighted to the world that the future of RISC-V has no limits!

The freedom of RISC-V enables a bright future for SiFive

In just a few short years, RISC-V has become a category of utmost importance in tech; but, things are just getting started.

Scalable High-Performance Computing SoC Design with RISC-V

Leading the RISC-V uprising drives SiFive, home of the inventors of RISC-V, to continue to push forward with developing our product families and technologies.

Introducing the new era of SiFive Performance for RISC-V

Introducing the SiFive Intelligence X280

OpenFive Tapes Out SoC for Advanced AI/HPC Solutions on TSMC 5nm Technology

Tremendous progress has been made in the last year bringing RISC-V vector (RVV) extensions to market in both hardware implementations and supporting compiler technologies.

The best just got better--SiFive’s latest Processor Core IP Portfolio release

Enabling more choice for Next-Generation Heterogeneous Compute Platforms

SiFive RISC-V processors are powering flash drives in production as well as addressing emerging In-Storage Computing (ISC) needs

Creating a RISC-V PC Ecosystem for Linux application development

Faster, More Efficient SiFive 7-Series Core IP

A note from SiFive President & CEO, Patrick Little

Building a secure foundation using the concept of randomness seems, on the surface, counter-intuitive.

The RISC-V Vector extension (RVV) enables processor cores based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture to process data arrays, alongside traditional scalar operations to accelerate the computation of single instruction streams on large data sets.

OpenFive is a solution-centric and processor agnostic custom silicon business unit dedicated to building optimized domain-specific SoCs

SiFive's Best Processor Portfolio Is Here

A Message From The CEO

Published by SemiWiki.

The SiFive Mission

Access, Observe, Control

A Note from Chris Lattner, New SVP of Platform Engineering

Introducing the new SiFive U8-Series Core IP

Securing The RISC-V Revolution

For consumers of low-end processors, the Dhrystone benchmark can be a valuable tool for estimating performance. Due to the nature of the Dhrystone benchmark, high-end Application Processor performance is incompletely represented by a Dhrystone score. For processor providers a Dhrystone score is a commonly used metric for instruction throughput comparison in early stage evaluation.

Highlights From the SiFive Tech Symposiums

The Information age transformed the world, fueled by silicon chips that became more powerful and more cost-effective every 18 months. The thinking of silicon design was led by engineers in the pursuit of faster, smaller transistors. As the Experience Age transcends the Information Age, the law underneath the technology changes from what’s possible, to what’s needed. Now, the ability to create purpose-built processors – secure, fast, efficient, and cost-effective – is the defining characteristic inside products that change lives through improved experiences and abilities.

With the move to a quarterly release program (see: Silicon At Speed Of Software), SiFive is innovating in the hardware space at an unprecedented pace. In the SiFive Core Designer update and the Core IP update we learned about new features being added to SiFive Core IP and the ability to quickly access those features via SiFive Core Designer, SiFive's Software-as-a Service (SaaS) application. We have also been hard at work making sure that our software enablement is just as configurable, and easy to access, as our hardware.

SiFive Core Designer (SCD) unlocks new possibilities by enabling engineers to explore the architectural design space of a CPU. With our Software-as-a Service (SaaS) application, customers can create and customize RISC-V core IP -- from their laptops.

The traditional cadence for microarchitecture updates is usually tied to process technology nodes or ground-up redesigns. The SiFive Core IP portfolio offers scalable microarchitectures from efficient application multi-core processors capable of running Linux, to tiny, power-sipping cores suitable for the most area constrained design points. The SiFive quarterly update program delivers key improvements, new features, and more capabilities to SiFive Core IP in a measured, methodical way. Here’s all the information you need on the SiFive Core IP Series and the latest updates!

Join SiFive Tech Symposiums in Tokyo, Daejeon, Pangyo, Hsinchu, Singapore and Sydney

We just wrapped up our six-city tour in Europe, which included Cambridge, Grenoble, Stockholm, Moscow, Munich and Amsterdam. Together with our co-hosts, Qamcom, Syntacore, Imagination Technologies and Mentor; and ecosystem partners, Rambus, IAR Systems, UltraSoC, Antmicro, SecureRF, Credo and lowRISC, we engaged with over 500 responses/registrations throughout the tour.

Hello Cambridge, Grenoble, Stockholm, Moscow, Munich and Amsterdam

Our 2019 global symposiums and workshops have been hugely successful in promoting the RISC-V ISA and fostering expansive collaboration within the open-source community. It's invigorating to see how the worldwide semiconductor ecosystem is energized and mobilized by the open ISA. One of the areas receiving the most attention is embedded intelligence. The RISC-V ISA is enabling designers and innovators to actively pursue solutions that employ enhanced embedded intelligence at the edge. The real-world applications of this are awesome and we are inspired by what we see!

During the afternoon session of the Symposium, Jack Kang, SiFive VP sales then addressed the RISC-V Core IP for vertical markets from consumer/smart home/wearables to storage/networking/5G to ML/edge. Embedding intelligence from the edge to the cloud can occur with U Cores 64-bit Application Processors, S Cores 64-bit Embedded Processors, and E Cores 32-bit Embedded Processors. Embedded intelligence allows mixing of application cores with embedded cores, extensible custom instructions, configurable memory for application tuning and other heterogeneous combination of real time and application processors. Some recently announced products is Huami in Wearable AI, Fadu SSD controller in Enterprise, Microsemi/Microchip upcoming FPGA architecture. Customization comes in 2 forms, customization of cores by configuration changes and by custom instructions in a reserved space on top of the base instruction set and standard extensions, guaranteeing no instruction collision with existing or future extensions, and preserving software compatibility.

HiFive1 Rev B: The Second Generation HiFive1 Dev Board and the Freedom Everywhere SoC, FE310

SiFive held a RISC-V Technology Symposium on February 26 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Keith Witek, SiFive SVP Corporate Development and Strategy kicked off the event and introduced the first keynote speaker Martin Fink, Western Digital CTO, at the time acting CEO of the RISC-V Foundation (as of this writing, Calista Redmond was just appointed the new CEO of the RISC-V Foundation). He shared a slide showing the growing RISC-V ecosystem from tools vendors, to IP/semi chip providers and design/foundry services. He stated that, moving forward, the areas of focus will include standards/specs, ecosystem growth, awareness and education.

We welcomed over 600 attendees to the SiFive Tech Symposiums in Austin, Mountain View and Boston. The feedback we received is flattering. We heard comments like, “You guys are going bold, and we love it!” and “SiFive has built a solid team with good breadth of business and technology expertise,” and “Very different take – and someone is addressing the pain point for hardware folks, finally!” There was a great deal of energy in the crowd, and people were thoroughly engaged all day long. Here’s a look back at some of the highlights:

In 2018, we hosted several RISC-V technology symposia in India, China and Israel. These events were very successful in fueling the growing momentum surrounding the RISC-V ISA in these countries. It turns out that these events were just the tip of the iceberg. In 2019, SiFive is greatly expanding its reach by hosting over 50 SiFive Tech Symposia in cities throughout the world. The first leg of the global tour begins in the USA. In collaboration with our co-hosts and partner companies, we aim to foster deeper education, collaboration and engagement within the open-source community.

In 2018, we saw the rapid proliferation of the RISC-V architecture, with commercial deployments of SiFive Core IP in a broad range of applications ranging from wearables and edge devices to the enterprise core. Modern compute workloads are evolving rapidly and require the ability to scale performance on demand and very often have real-time, deterministic requirements. This diversity of workloads poses computational challenges that can be resolved only by domain-specific architectures. With the advent of 5G, core networks are transforming from hierarchical models in which intelligence was concentrated at the core to a decentralized structure where intelligence is getting distributed to the edge.

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We are really excited to see Wave Computing announce the open MIPS ISA and R6 processor core. SiFive would like to congratulate and welcome MIPS to the open-source community with its MIPS Open Initiative. The addition of the MIPS 32 and 64-bit open ISA will provide more options freely available to SoC designers. The open-source processor community, based on the RISC-V ISA, is thriving, and the addition of MIPS underscores the fact that the world is indeed becoming more open. Open ISA enables chip designers, innovators and academics to explore and expand their designs. The ability to add extensions to the base ISA makes it an attractive option for applications requiring special configurations. Chip designers no longer have to settle for an off-the-shelf processor. SiFive RISC-V cores have enabled a high degree of customization, which our customers have loved and used to create designs at 1/3 the power and area versus other solutions.

Hi everyone! I'm Nathaniel Graff, a software engineer here at SiFive, and I'm excited to tell you about the most recent release of Zephyr RTOS, version 1.13.0! Zephyr RTOS is a real-time operating system hosted by The Linux Foundation, featuring support for a myriad of different platforms, architectures, and targets including SiFive's E-series CoreIP, and the HiFive 1 development board.

It's been another week, which means it's time to find another host for "Last Week in RISC-V". This week we're going to attempt a blog at riscv.org, which will hopefully be a good long-term home for this series of articles.

This week's entry is fairly short, but it does come with one major improvement: we now have a mailing list! I've decided to create a Google Group at SiFive, and while I understand that's not ideal it's the best I can figure out for now. The Google Groups interface is quick clunky, so if you're looking for archives it's probably still best to use GitHub. Hopefully this makes it easier for people to find the mailing list.

Introduction to Linux Kernel Development

GNU Tools Cauldron Trip Report, Part 2

This is the last version of "Last Week in RISC-V" that I plan on sending to the various mailing lists, as we'll be posting the rest of them on SiFive's Blog. I didn't get any contributions, but I also haven't gotten through my email yet -- sorry if I missed anything that's been sent it, but I'm not too far behind so I should have everything read from this week by the end of next week.

The FU540-C000, which is available on the HiFive Unleashed development board, is a Linux capable board based on the open source Freedom platform. We built this chip to drive RISC-V Linux development, and it's been incredibly successful. In the three months since we started shipping the board the RISC-V Linux distribution porting effort, with Debian and Fedora leading the charge, has come farther that it had come in the previous 5 years. It's been incredible watching the open source community get behind the RISC-V ISA, and the level of progress has exceeded anything we could have predicted at the beginning of this year.

Welcome to the first issue of "Last Week in RISC-V", a weekly newsletter tracking the RISC-V community. This newsletter was born out of a discussion in SiFive's internal RISC-V software team and I'm compiling it so it'll have a somewhat heavy focus on the open source software community for now as that's where I spend most of my time. The general idea behind "Last Week in RISC-V" is that the RISC-V ecosystem is getting big enough that it's impossible for any single person to track everything going on. For a while we had the patches mailing list, but we've outgrown a single mailing list for all development -- plus, this mailing list is just for patches to core RISC-V software components so it isn't wide enough in scope to cover everything going on it the RISC-V ecosystem.

On Wednesday, July 25th, SiFive had the pleasure of hosting Girl Geek X at our offices in San Mateo. Girl Geek X is a brilliant organization with the aim of connecting women across companies large and small for the purposes of networking and sharing career advice in the fast-paced tech industry. Over the past 10 years, Girl Geek X has grown from a 400-person dinner hosted by Google to a well-known Bay Area group with a membership base of more than 15,000.

Last week SiFive launched the new E2 Series RISC-V Core IP. The E2 Series represents SiFive’s smallest, most efficient Core IP Series and is targeted specifically for embedded microcontroller designs. One of the reasons it is great for microcontroller applications is because of its extremely small area footprint, just 0.023mm² in 28nm for the entire E20 Standard Core! Another reason it's great for the embedded market is its configurability. The E2 Series can be configured even smaller than the E20 Standard Core by removing things like the Interrupt Controller and support for the M extension. Another major reason the E2 Series is great for microcontroller applications is its support for the new RISC-V Core Local Interrupt Controller (CLIC) which allows for extremely low latency interrupt operation, hardware preemption, and hardware prioritization of all interrupts. The CLIC specification is a result of collaboration between RISC-V members in the RISC-V Foundation’s Fast Interrupts Technical Group and the draft specification can be found here.

Good news, HiFive fans! A limited supply of HiFive Unleashed Development Kits are now available on CrowdSupply for purchase.

We recently announced that Intel Capital participated in our Series C funding round! Our CEO, Naveed Sherwani, revealed the investment earlier this month at the Intel Capital Global Summit.

We’re very happy to announce that Intel Capital participated in our recent Series C funding round. The investment was revealed at the Intel Capital Global Summit earlier today.

QEMU 2.12.0 was released on April 24th 2018 and this version is the first official QEMU version to contain the RISC-V port. This is yet another milestone towards the development of the Open Source RISC-V tools on top of the recent acceptance of RISC-V in Linux kernel 4.15 in December last year and GLIBC 2.27 this past February.

Boy have we been busy. Over the last few months, our DesignShare ecosystem has continued to expand, and, this week, we were excited to welcome Dover Microsystems into the program.