RISC-V : Will SiFive be a Winner?
Why I’m rooting for SiFive
RISC-V is Inevitable.
When The Chip Letter readership shared their views on RISC-V’s future, the majority of those who voted thought that RISC-V would become, as a minimum, the most popular ISA in 20 years.
SiFive has been at the centre of the development of RISC-V.
The company was founded by three of the Berkeley Academics who came up with the idea of RISC-V, and then did much of the work needed to make it a reality. It’s been a pioneer in creating some of the highest performance RISC-V cores. Here is a sample of the company’s milestones:
First company to produce a chip that implements the RISC-V ISA.
First RISC-V based 64-bit quad-core CPU to support Linux.
Has consistently offered the highest performing, licensable RISC-V CPUs.
P550 design adopted by Intel for the Horse Creek platform.
Raised over $350m in funding.
Investors include : Intel Capital, Qualcomm Capital, Sutter Hill
Customers include : Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm and NASA
Early in October the company held an analyst briefing and announced two new cores. From reports of the meeting management were extremely bullish and talked up the range and quality of SiFive’s offerings:
He said the company has 350 design wins and customers include Intel, Amazon, Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, NASA and more. SiFive started in the embedded market and moved up the food chain to high-performance cores.
As for competition, Little said it’s a two-horse race between SiFive and Arm. He noted every one of Arm’s top customers are also SiFive’s top customers.
“We don’t have these different systems that we duct-tape together,” Asanovic said. “We are a very broad portfolio and within that broad portfolio we provide all the pieces.”
Then, just two weeks later, Dr Ian Cuttress broke the news of layoffs at the company:
Founder, Krste Asanovic later confirmed that around 20% of SiFive’s entire workforce were being laid off:
At SiFive, we made the difficult decision to reduce our workforce by approximately 20% across the entire organization as part of a restructuring effort, even though we are financially strong with fully committed investors and a large order book.
So what does this all mean? In the rest of this post we’ll look at recent events, and the prospects for SiFive.
And the obvious starting point is to compare with the most successful and longstanding of SiFive competitors : Arm
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