SiFive: Next-Gen RISC-V Cores Can Compete With Arm and Intel

SiFive has announced its next-generation RISC-V core. According to the company, it performs up to fifty percent better than its current P550 core. This allows the new cores to compete with the current cores from Arm and Intel, according to the company.

The single-threaded performance of the next-generation SiFive RISC-V cores “closes” to Intel’s Rocket Lake generation and Arm’s Cortex-A78 cores. That is what James Prior, SiFive’s head of marketing and communications, claims to The Register. The company does not yet share concrete benchmark results.

The new SiFive cores have not yet been named. They would be based on the current SiFive P550 cores, which the company introduced in June. The new generation will include 16MB L3 cache and a clock speed of 3.5GHz. The new cores can be further combined in clusters of up to sixteen cores. The current P550 core has 4MB L3 cache and runs at 2.4GHz. The P550 also supports smaller clusters, of up to four cores.

The new SiFive processors could be used in PCs and servers, and scaled-back variants could be used for mobile applications and embedded devices, the company said. Tom’s Hardware writes that the new cores can be used, for example, in socs with a maximum of 128 cores. The new cores will be released as rtl next year, the company reports. This allows customers to imitate the cores on an fpga and use them, for example, to develop software.

SiFive has been in the news more often last week. Intel had planned to take over the company, but according to Bloomberg sources, these takeover talks have stalled. That would have happened because the two companies could not agree on “financial terms” for the acquisition. SiFive declined to comment to The Register.

Image: SiFive