With its New RISC-V Processors, SiFive Bets on Compute Density

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Aiming to usurp Arm processors in size-constrained, compute hungry designs like wearables, SiFive has expanded its RISC-V "Performance" line of processors.

www.allaboutcircuits.com, Nov. 02, 2022 – 

The momentum for RISC-V continues to grow, as a variety of technologies and products have emerged this year leveraging RISC-V technology. Feeding that trend, today SiFive announced the addition of two processors–the P670 and P470–to its Performance line of RISC-V IP-based processors.

In this article, we examine the details of the new processors, we compare them to their Arm counterparts, and we share insights from our interview with Drew Barbier, Senior Director of Product Management at SiFive.

New Features Expand Application Focus

The P670 IP adds to the company's P600-series line, the first of which was the P650. The company provided a sneak peak of the P650 at last year's RISC-V Summit. Today's announcement also includes SiFIve's P470, which the company has not previously shared publicly.

According to Barbier, the new processors are aimed at meeting the need for performance and efficiency, but in a format that suits small size and high volume system designs. Example applications include wearables, smart home, industrial automation, AR/VR, and other consumer devices.

Wearables is the use case that best exemplifies where Barbier says that these new processors will have an edge over equivalent counterparts from Arm's Cortex processor line.

There are a number of new features that the P470 and P670 products share. Both support virtualization, including a separate IOMMU for accelerating virtualized device I/O. The processors implement full, out-of-order, RISC-V vector implementation, based on the ratified RISC-V vector v1.0 specification.

Other features the two processors share are RISC-V vector cryptography extensions and SiFive's WorldGuard system security functionality. Importantly, the processors are the first on the market to support full RISC-V RVA22 profile compliance, says Barbier. The processors also feature a new Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) compliant interrupt controller, which includes better support for Message Signal Interrupts (MSI) and virtualization.

P670 Targets Wearables and More

According to Barbier, the P670 is well suited for applications like advanced wearables, networking, robotics, and mobile. The P650 differs from the P650 by including a vector unit ALU. Specifically, the processor has two 28-bit Vector ALUs that are compliant with the ratified RISC-V Vector v1.0 specification.

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