The partnership will see Intel license SiFive's IP to create its own SiFive P550-based 64-bit SoC that it will fabricate on its new 7 nm node. It will form the basis of a new development platform Intel is calling Horse Creek, and will be made available to customers interested in exploring its potential in various applications involving embedded SoC tech. This could mean smartphones, but also cars, IoT products and the like. If Intel gets enough interest, it could take the relationship further. Intel hasn't yet revealed the technical specifications of the SoC, so we don't know whether it will be a single-core or multi-core platform, although the latter is likely. It's GPU tech is also unknown at this time, but Xe-based graphics are likely.
While the first Horse Creek SoCs will be ready next year, it isn't likely we will see any Intel RISC-V-based chips in commercially available products until 2023 at least.
SiFive recently announced two new high-performance 64-bit RISC-V cores, the Performance P550 and Performance P270:
SiFive compares the Performance P550 core to Arm's Cortex-A75 with higher performance in SPECint2006 and SPECfp2006 integer/floating-point benchmark, all [in] a much smaller area which would enable a quad-core P550 cluster on about the same footprint as a single Cortex-A75 core.
See also: Ubuntu 20.04/21.04 64-bit RISC-V released for QEMU, HiFive boards
Previously: Intel May Attempt to Acquire SiFive for $2 Billion
Related Stories
[According] to Bloomberg, Intel has reportedly offered over $2 billion to acquire the fabless semiconductor SiFive, a provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture.
Should this deal become a reality, it would mark the climax of growing bonhomie between Intel and SiFive. For instance, back in 2018, Intel was one of the participants in the Series C funding round of SiFive. Thereafter, in March 2021, SiFive announced a collaboration with the Intel Foundry Business (IFB) to develop innovative new RISC-V computing platforms.
Of course, unlike legacy Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs), RISC-V's proponents believe that it addresses the skyrocketing cost of designing and manufacturing increasingly complex new chip architectures, given that that the ISA is layered, extensible, and flexible. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some believe RISC-V to be the future.
Bear in mind that SiFive was last valued at $500 million, as per the data available at PitchBook. This means that Intel would be paying a premium of over 300 percent relative to SiFive's 2020 valuation.
Previously: SiFive HiFive Unleashed Not as Open as Previously Thought
Qualcomm Invests in RISC-V Startup SiFive
SiFive Announces a RISC-V Core With an Out-of-Order Microarchitecture
GlobalFoundries and SiFive Partner on High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2E)
SiFive to Debut a RISC-V PC for Developers in October
SiFive Announces HiFive Unmatched Mini-ITX Motherboard for RISC-V PCs
SiFive reckons its fastest RISC-V processor core yet is closing the gap on being a mainstream computing alternative to x86 and Arm.
The yet-unnamed high-performance design is within reach of Intel's Rocket Lake family, introduced in March, and Arm's Cortex-A78 design, announced last year, in terms of single-core performance, James Prior, senior director of product marketing and communications at SiFive, told The Register.
San Francisco-based SiFive didn't provide specific comparative benchmarks, so you'll have to take their word for it, if you so choose.
[...] SiFive's latest design, which is set to be teased today, will be christened with a formal name at the RISC-V Summit in December.
The CPU core is said to be about 50 per cent faster than its predecessor, the P550, which was introduced in June. We note that the L3 cache memory capacity has been quadrupled, from the 4MB in the P550 to 16MB in the new design. Up to 16 of these new cores can be clustered versus the maximum of four for the P550. The latest design can also run up to 3.5GHz compared to 2.4GHz for the P550.
Intel's Attempt to Acquire SiFive for $2 Billion Fell Apart, Report Claims
While Intel was interested to acquire RISC-V processor developer SiFive and SiFive is considering its strategic options, the companies could not agree neither on financial terms nor on how SiFive technologies could be used at Intel reports Bloomberg. The latter company is still considering both an initial public offering (IPO) as well as a takeover by a larger player.
Previously: SiFive Announces HiFive Unmatched Mini-ITX Motherboard for RISC-V PCs
Intel May Attempt to Acquire SiFive for $2 Billion
Intel Will License SiFive's New P550 RISC-V Core
SiFive Details New Performance P650 RISC-V Core
SiFive's Performance P650 licenseable processor IP core will debut to lead partners in Q1'2022 while the general availability is expected in "summer" 2022. Whether the Performance P650 will make its way into any public SiFive developer boards or the like remain unknown, but hopefully they will come out next year with some performant successor to the HiFive Unmatched.
This successor to their Performance P550 is expected to be the fastest RISC-V processor IP core on the market. Over the P550 should be around a 40% performance increase per-clock cycle. Overall there should be around a 50% performance gain over the P550. SiFive is reporting the Performance P650 will be faster than the Arm Cortex-A77.
SiFive Performance P650 RISC-V core to outperform Arm Cortex-A77 performance per mm2
Building upon the Performance P550 design, the SiFive Performance P650 is scalable to sixteen cores using a coherent multicore complex, and delivers a 40% performance increase per clock cycle based on SiFive engineering estimated performance in SPECInt2006/GHz, thanks to an expansion of the processor's instruction-issue width. The company compares P650 to the Arm family by saying it "maintains a significant performance-per-area advantage compared to the Arm Cortex-A77".
Other architecture enhancements over the previous generation include a higher maximum clock frequency (Liliputing says up to 3.5 GHz), platform-level memory management, interrupt control units, and support for the new RISC-V hypervisor extension for virtualization.
Previously:
Intel Will License SiFive's New P550 RISC-V Core
SiFive Teases Fast New RISC-V Processor Core; Intel Acquisition Attempt Failed
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 28 2021, @05:50PM (7 children)
I don't know if these numbers are exactly right. I am recalling them (hopefully correctly) from some lecture / presentation on YouTube.
Intel processor programming book is 1600 pages. And doesn't cover some subsets of instructions.
RISC-V instruction set fits on one page.
Gee that comparison sounds like Common Lisp vs Scheme. Scheme is(was) described (originally) in under 50 pages. In CLtL, even the index can't fit into 50 pages.
Is it time for the layers and layers of baggage and cruft in Intel's product line to finally be swept into the dustbin of history? How many transistors does it take to implement all that in hardware? They have a RISC like microcode, and the CISC instructions are converted into these micro ops in hardware?
What if you could use RSIC but the same fabrication technology and dedicate a lot of those transistors to more parallelism? More speculative execution? Even just more cores exposed to the system designer.
What if a system's CPU had so many cores that GPUs were unnecessary?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 28 2021, @06:04PM (1 child)
>> More speculative execution?
I think we know where that would lead...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 28 2021, @09:32PM
Maybe that could be fixed by adding more management engines to the processor.
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 28 2021, @07:17PM (3 children)
Both Intel and AMD are well aware that x86 will be obsoleted eventually, that's why they are buying FPGA designers... Cutting-edge research and supercomputers can have specialized hardware processors, the rest of us will be just fine with processors that can optimize themselves for any workload with a few kernel calls, and run any legacy software with ease. I'd be more worried about VMWare than Intel...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday June 28 2021, @07:35PM (2 children)
Both Intel and AMD are going to have "mainstream" 24-core CPUs and adopt variations of big.LITTLE within the next 3 years for better performance-per-area and power efficiency. x86 will be 10 years away from dying for years to come.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Monday June 28 2021, @07:59PM
It's not "x86", x86 is already dead. More and more distros abandoning 32-bit. It's AMD64, since the very first Athlon64 CPU when Intel had to license the AMD ISA to survive into the new millenium.
At one moment in history, we'll get pure AMD64 architecture, the CPU powered starting in full 64long addressing mode without all that 16-bit and 32-bit junk shit kept along only because of Microsoft, without all those instructions unusable and forbidden in 64long.
I remember a tiny piece of source code released for public in early 2000's, written by someone at AMD to demonstrate lockless data structures in pure assembly, the then new architecture was called X64 in headers, internally.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday June 28 2021, @09:34PM
I think due to inertia, the x86 and x64 platform will be here for a very, very long time.
Heck, look at IBM mainframes. COBOL.
But I think a shift is coming where it won't be the cool shiny thing any more. It will be a way to run legacy software. These kinds of changes do not ever happen overnight.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 29 2021, @02:58PM
scheme isn't lisp...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 28 2021, @05:57PM (8 children)
Apparently there is at least one effort to port Java to RiSC-V. BishengJDK 11 RISC-V port [gitee.com]
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 28 2021, @07:02PM (7 children)
DannyB's eyes start to glow. "Java?" he asks.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Monday June 28 2021, @09:39PM (6 children)
Yes, Java. And Linux. Both of those are where you find big workloads on big hardware.
But the link I gave also points out . . .
My observation:
Wow, movable type that early. 1051 AD was a long time before Johann Gutenberg, who in 1455 invented the Bible. The Gutenberg Bible.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 29 2021, @12:17AM (5 children)
Them Chinese invented bunch of good stuff first in history - paper, gun powder, silk, tea, General Tso's chicken, etc. etc.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 29 2021, @05:52AM
... Covid-19
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 29 2021, @02:04PM (3 children)
I hope you realize that General Tso's chicken is a good ol' genuine American food. It's as American as Tacos and Pizza.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 29 2021, @02:34PM (2 children)
Nachos are a modern American invention, tacos are ancient and predate the Spanish conquest.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 29 2021, @02:40PM (1 child)
Are you saying Tacos are not as American as General Tso's Chicken?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 29 2021, @08:13PM
Yes. They come from a tradition far older and broader than what can be captured by "American".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 29 2021, @05:29PM
Finally, an implementation of a freely licensed ISA which includes a hardware backdoor. Thanks, Intel!