SiFive Boasts of the "Highest-Performance RISC-V Processor" in Its New P550 Design
Company claims its latest part is the highest-performing RISC-V core around — but won't be releasing the design under an open license.
RISC-V pioneer SiFive has once again laid claim to a performance crown, announcing what it says is the "highest-performance RISC-V processor IP" around — and relegates its previous designs to a new family dubbed SiFive Essential.
SiFive got its start with implementations of the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture focused, as many are, on the embedded market - including developing an Arduino Uno-like board dubbed the HiFive1. While its Freedom Everywhere 310 (FE310) was powerful enough for embedded use, the company set its sights higher — much higher.
The HiFive Unmatched was announced eight months ago as the heart of a planned Linux-capable RISC-V desktop development system, offering a high-performance Freedom U740 system-on-chip combining four application-class U74 RISC-V cores and a fifth real-time S7 RISC-V core, mated on an ITX-compatible board with 8GB of DDR4 memory, later upgraded before shipping to 16GB..
Now, though, the HiFive Unmatched has met its match: The SiFive Performance P550, which the company claims is "the highest performance RISC-V processor available today" with a whopping 8.65/GHz SPECInt 2006 score.
"SiFive Performance is a significant milestone in our commitment to deliver a complete, scalable portfolio of RISC-V cores to customers in all markets who are at the vanguard of SoC design and are dissatisfied with the status quo," claims Yunsup Lee, PhD, the co-founder and chief technology officer of SiFive.
"These two new products cover new performance points and a wide range of application areas, from efficient vector processors that easily displace yesterday’s SIMD architectures, to the bleeding edge that the P550 represents. SiFive is proud to set the standard for RISC-V processing and is ready to deliver these products to customers today."
Two products, rather than one, because the P550 isn't alone: The top-performance P550 is joined by the P270, an eight-stage dual-issue in-order core to the P550's 13-stage triple-issue out-of-order pipeline.
The launch of the two parts sees a reshuffling of the company's line-up: The P550 and P270 make up the new SiFive Performance range; the X280, announced back in April, is the first and currently only entry in the SiFive Intelligence range aimed at artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads; and the rest of the company's cores get lumped together in a family it calls SiFive Essential.
Both the new SiFive Performance cores are now available, but the company is keeping the IP closed source — a move allowed by the permissive license under which the RISC-V ISA is published.