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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @07:02PM (2 children)
A Linux profile isn't the issue, it's lack of drivers and tivoization.
Linux on ARM is an unholy mess. Google is promising to deliver a roadmap of Project Mainline at around Android 15 but for single board computers it's still hack a vendor's Linux and uboot kernel forks and hope someone at armbian has the same board. RPi is only functional because the foundation hired developers to reverse engineer a lot of proprietary Broadcom stuff such as VideoCore.
Risc-V attempts to address some of that in a cleaner way - which is why Haiku was able to bootstrap the platform in a few months rather than the decades the ARM port has languished.
But if the only affordable riscv board has some crappy PowerVR GPU in it, hard pass - I'll buy an off the shelf x86.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday December 03 2021, @07:29PM (1 child)
I remember once upon a time when the common wisdom was that Linux would always be an obscure niche product that could never gain major commercial traction.
Now here we are. Linux has taken over the world. It is in everything around us. Even a Windows fanboi has more Linux machines than Windows machines.
Microsoft has embraced open source. Recognized the need to build WSL.
I have hope that RISC-V will upset the locked down chip industry. Why is ARM the only other company making an Intel compatible chip? Oh, yeah, because the architecture is closed and requires licensing.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday December 06 2021, @03:45PM
Sorry I meant AMD not ARM making intel compatible.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.