In June 2024, SiFive announced the 4th generation of its Essential Product line. Products from the Essential family are already deployed in billions of consumer and IoT products including smartphones, sensors, SSDs, FPGA platforms, surveillance cameras, smartwatches and more. This new release contains a wide range of iterations on the previous generations and numerous new features. The inspiration for the majority of these enhancements came from customer feedback. One specific example is the support for AMBA ACE, a protocol for bidirectional data coherency that enables customers to create systems with multiple clusters of Essential processors.

At the RISC-V Summit in North America this week, RISC-V International announced that the RVA23 Profile has been ratified. The fundamental objective behind RVA Profiles is to ensure software portability across hardware implementations.. This announcement reminded me of an important question that Krste Asanović, Co-founder and Chief Architect at SiFive and Chief Architect of RISC-V International, brought up during his 2024 presentations at the RISC-V Summit Europe in Munich and (more recently) at the RISC-V Summit China in Hangzhou. During these sessions, Krste tackled the (much asked) question: is RISC-V flexible or rigid? The answer is “Yes!”

Reflecting on how far we’ve come since SiFive launched the world’s first RISC-V development boards back in 2016, it’s clear we’ve been on an incredible journey together with the RISC-V software community. Those early boards, like the HiFive1, were game-changers—true ignitors for the entire RISC-V revolution. Since then, SiFive has continued to innovate, releasing new boards every 2 years, adding more performance and features, pushing the ecosystem forward.

SiFive’s mission is to create the best computing solutions in the world so our customers can deliver differentiated, best-in-class products. We do this not only by building great intellectual property (IP), but also by driving the RISC-V ecosystem forward. The open standard RISC-V architecture is the last instruction set architecture (ISA) that will ever matter. It’s not often that you can be part of a computing revolution; especially one that is revolutionizing systems as we know them. SiFive helps spur innovation across a broad community while ensuring our customers benefit from the evolution of our high-performance IP, ecosystem, extensions, and tools.

Large language models (LLMs) have become essential to numerous applications, thanks to their powerful capabilities in natural language understanding and text generation. However, their large model sizes and high computational demands present significant challenges for efficient deployment and real-time performance.

In case you missed it at the 2024 Samsung Developer Conference today, our partners at Samsung Visual Display discussed the work they have been doing to port the Tizen operating system to RISC-V. Tizen is an open-source operating system (OS) that is used in many Samsung smart T.V.s and it makes sense that they would look to the fast growing, global open-standard RISC-V to develop future systems. The presentation showed the results of efforts at both companies to expand the capabilities of the already robust Tizen approach. At the event they also demonstrated a T.V. running on RISC-V and using a SiFive Performance P470 based core.