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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 03 2021, @10:09PM (2 children)
The question for me - who is actually going to fab these SiFive designs into a handset?
A phone is more than a CPU, you also have to license a 4G modem. I could see a niche player like Purism or Pine64 adopting this but that niche is a few thousand compared to the millions per annum the big players sell.
Chinese researchers are eager to switch to riscv but they're more likely to use their own western-free IP and partner with a homegrown modem such as unisoc or, gasp, a reborn Huawei.
Don't mean to FUD because I could see a riscv machine becoming my main home machine with 5 years if these SiFive ones delivered bang for buck over Celeron NUCs.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 03 2021, @10:30PM (1 child)
Well, I subbed this a few days ago:
First RISC-V Smartphones Could Launch in 2022 [soylentnews.org]
That product would probably be like a PinePhone: a mess. But if China gets serious about RISC-V, it will happen.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 04 2021, @12:14AM
Understood that the Chinese will make a phone sooner rather than later but that's Xuantie, not SiFive.
Were I an investor I would not bet SiFive's farm on cell phones.
Unless Intel has major plans for Horse Creek, I can't see any medium player such as Nokia or Moto ditching Snapdragon or Mediatek for SiFive Inside.