High-performance RISC-V cores from SiFive

SiFive has announced two high-performance RISC-V processing cores.

“P670 and P470 are specifically designed for the most demanding workloads for wearables and other advanced consumer applications,” said SiFive v-p Chris Jones. “We have optimised these RISC-V Vector-enabled products to deliver performance and efficiency improvements and we are in evaluations with a number of top-tier customers.”

Both are also available in space-saving versions without vector units.

P670

3.4GHz in 5nm
12 SpecINT2k6/GHz
2x 128bit vector ALU to RISC-V Vector v1.0 spec
available without vector unit as P650 (already shipping)

P470

>3.4GHz in 5nm
>8SpecINT2k6/GHz
1x 128bit vector ALU to RISC-V Vector v1.0 spec
available without vector unit as P450

“P470 is SiFive’s first efficiency-focused out-of-order area-optimised vector processor, ideal for applications like wearables, consumer, and smart home devices,” according to the company. “P470 was designed to also serve as a companion to the P670 processor for demanding applications that require a sharing of compute resources while optimising power consumption.”

Both support virtualisation, including a separate memory management unit for IO to accelerate virtualised IO, RISC-V Vector Cryptography extensions, SiFive WorldGuard security, RISC-V RVA22 profile compliance, and have an interrupt controller compliant with AIA (advanced interrupt architecture), with better support for MSI (message signal interrupts) and with virtualisation.

Clusters with up to 16 cores are supported

More details are expected later today from the Linley Fall Microprocessor Conference.