Delivering on the Promise of Industry-Leading RISC-V Processors

Leading the RISC-V uprising drives SiFive, home of the inventors of RISC-V, to continue to push forward with developing our product families and technologies.

RISC-V for High-Performance Applications

Earlier this year, we debuted the SiFive Intelligence family at the Linley Group Spring Processor Conference, including one of our lead customers, Tenstorrent, who will integrate the SiFive Intelligence X280 in a future product line. In June, we introduced the SiFive Performance family of processors, including the SiFive Performance P500.

With the SiFive 21G2 release, we are pleased to invite designers to evaluate these new processors, as well as discover the 21G2 release enhancements to the SiFive Essential processor family. From the fastest RISC-V commercial processor IP available today, the SiFive Performance P550(1), to the newly enhanced SiFive Essential product lineup, SiFive offers the broadest and most capable RISC-V-based processor portfolio. We continue to work with technology innovators and industry leaders to develop new products that will push the envelope of computing capabilities.

To ease smooth adoption of this new technology, SiFive Recode automatically translates existing Arm® Neon™ code to RISC-V Vector code for the SiFive Intelligence and SiFive Performance products that offer RISC-V Vector extension execution capability. Included in the SiFive Freedom toolchain are GCC and LLVM compilers specifically designed to help write software optimized for RISC-V and the RISC-V Vector extension.

Join us in September at the RISC-V Forum for RISC-V Vectors and Machine Learning to learn more about the potential for RISC-V Vectors, an open specification developed by Industry-leading companies & researchers, to address modern computing challenges.

Making Development Easier

Developing ahead of silicon availability is key to a smooth and fast product development cycle. SiFive includes and supports Linux FPGA bitstreams with its SiFive Performance, Intelligence, and Essential application processors. The Linux software development platform is based on the Xilinx VCU118 to provide a fast, no-hassle mechanism to evaluate SiFive cores in an off-the-shelf environment. Included with the processor core bitstream is a functional peripheral subsystem, including common interfaces, and SiFive Insight Advanced Trace and Debug to enable processor evaluation. The SiFive Freedom SDK enables application development and workload modeling to help product evaluation as you program the FPGA, build your SD card, and boot into Linux to get started.

SiFive Relentless Innovation

Driven by the market demand for workload-focused designs, SiFive processor cores are configurable with unmatched options for workload tuning. Our innovative methodology and automation enable us to deliver not just new products like the recently announced SiFive Performance family of processors, but also enhance and advance our existing product families. You can license access to cores, families, or the entire portfolio, ensuring you have the flexibility and scalability you need to fuel your product roadmap.

We call this process SiFive relentless innovation, and it’s the backbone of the SiFive 21G2 update that offers many new features and enhancements that are now available.

Faster is Essential

The SiFive Essential 7-series processor cores continue to offer enhanced performance, without significantly impacting power or area. With the SiFive 21G2 release, SiFive Essential 7-series processors offer up to 11% more performance than the 21G1 release(2), thanks to the enhanced design updates that reduce latency and improve instruction throughput. These performance improvements deliver important increases in efficiency for SiFive Essential 7-Series processors, which have applications in many markets including computational storage, edge computing, IoT, network baseband, virtual reality, and more.

Programmable Remapping

SiFive Essential S7, E7, S5, E5, S2, and E2 embedded and control processors now offer software programmable address remapping to enable data region remapping and ROM code patching, with support for both instruction and data addresses. The address remapper is configurable to provide a balanced trade-off between area use and functionality, offering up to 64 remap regions that can scale from 4 bytes to the full address space.

The SiFive Essential family is silicon-proven IP in the world’s leading foundries, and offers SiFive Insight advanced trace and debugging capabilities to make it easy to integrate and productize RISC-V-based processors. For more information on the SiFive products discussed today, please watch our webinar replay, available now.

Footnote
1 - Based on SiFive Internal Engineering measurement of a geomean score of 8.65 SPECint2k6/GHz and 9.4 SPECfp2k6/GHz by SiFive Performance P550 in emulation using maximum performance configuration with simulated memory subsystem at 100ns memory latency (load to use) running the full SPECit 2006 benchmark.
2 - The SiFive Essential 7-series 21G2 processors offer up to 11% higher score, comparing aggregate percentage increase of CoreMark/MHz and Dhrystone/MHz scores versus the 7-series 21G1 release processor scores, as measured by SiFive internal engineering team: SiFive U7 & S7 21G2 = 5.7 CoreMark/MHz & 3.2 Dhrystone/MHz; SiFive E7 21G2 = 5.7 CoreMark/MHz & 3.0 Dhrystone/MHz; SiFive U7 & S7 21G1 = 5.2 CoreMark/MHz & 2.8 Dhrystone/MHz; SiFive E7 21G1 = 5.2 CoreMark/MHz & 2.6 Dhrystone/MHz.
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