RISC-V: SiFive’s P870

[dada_dave]

Chips and cheese breaks down the SiFive presentation at Hotchips.

Hot Chips 2023: SiFive’s P870 Takes RISC-V Further

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture, which means that anyone can create a core that understands RISC-V instructions without worrying about patents and licenses. SiFive is an important pl…

chipsandcheese.com

Now, SiFive’s P870 looks a lot like ARM’s Cortex X series in terms of reordering capacity, core width, and execution units. It might not be a match for ARM’s best, since the load/store queues look a bit small and vector execution throughput is a bit weak. But from looking at P870, SiFive’s ambitions are clear. They want a chunk of ARM’s pie.

SiFive’s biggest challenge is going to be the software ecosystem. RISC-V’s vector extensions are still in their infancy. Not a lot of people are going to be familiar with RISC-V. Compilers will have to be tuned to ensure instruction fusion cases happen as often as possible. ARM has had a rough time getting their footing in the software world, and RISC-V will have to go through the same arduous process.

 

[leman]

Great to see that there is progress on the RISC-V front! I wonder how SiFive is positioning these chips? They are not competitive for HPC, but could make a decent cloud server processor (for web services and such) if priced accordingly.