SiFive U8-Series To Offer Much Greater RISC-V Performance

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SiFive U8-Series To Offer Much Greater RISC-V Performance

There is much greater performance potential out of RISC-V now with SiFive having announced the U8-Series...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SiFiv-U8-Series-RISC-V-New

[milkylainen]

Disclaimer: I don't know how successful SiFive is at selling their implementations.
I think SiFive would make a better mark on the industry and the world if they continued development,
freed up their implementations, but found funding otherwise.
Right now, there are better cores with more features, better ecosystems and probably for less money.
Competing with ARM and other established vendors with a IP-vendor 101 business model feels like they are barking up the wrong tree.

[microcode]

Disclaimer: I don't know how successful SiFive is at selling their implementations.
I think SiFive would make a better mark on the industry and the world if they continued development,
freed up their implementations, but found funding otherwise.
Right now, there are better cores with more features, better ecosystems and probably for less money.
Competing with ARM and other established vendors with a IP-vendor 101 business model feels like they are barking up the wrong tree.

They still may end up doing so. I think they have something really valuable in their tools for building SoCs.

[pkese]

According to their own announcement:

The SiFive U84 standard core offers an incredible increase of 2X better area efficiency and 1.5X better performance/watt, with very competitive performance when compared to an Arm® Cortex®-A72 processor.

[tuxd3v]

If they claim its competitive with the ARM A72, in SpecInt2006, it is a good comparison..
Because A72 has a strong Integer performance..
But the thing here is...they are operating at 2.6Ghz, and expecting performance competitive with Socs that work at 1.8-2Ghz??

Also it was the idea I got.. their validation was guess estimated.. not a real implementation..

[zxy_thf]

According to their own announcement:

The SiFive U84 standard core offers an incredible increase of 2X better area efficiency and 1.5X better performance/watt, with very competitive performance when compared to an Arm® Cortex®-A72 processor.

Both area efficiency and performance/watt are ambiguous metrics -- we don't know how much they benefit from the 7nm manufacturing process.

[pkese]

But the thing here is...they are operating at 2.6Ghz, and expecting performance competitive with Socs that work at 1.8-2Ghz??

All that matters in the end is number of transistors, total performance and performance per watt.
Whether it is implemented with long and thin or short and fat pipeline is an implementation detail.

[Edit] ... or low IPC with high frequency.

[pkese]

Both area efficiency and performance/watt are ambiguous metrics -- we don't know how much they benefit from the 7nm manufacturing process.

Either
a) you didn't read the SiFive's announcement,
b) you read it carelessly, or
c) you didn't understand it.

[uid313]

CloudBEAR.ru are making RISC-V processors.
Syntacore are making RISC-V processors.
A subsidary of Alibaba Group is making a high-performance RISC-V processor that they are planning to open source.

I hope that China builds like a TOP500 petaflop computer based on RISC-V, they have their own CPU based on their own Sunway architecture, but that is boring, they should just switch to RISC-V instead.

Apple has huge amount of resources and already make their own ARM-based Apple A12 "Bionic" processors, they really could switch to RISC-V and reduce their costs by cutting out ARM.

Samsung could make a RISC-V microcontroller for their SSD, cameras, TV and other products.

Hypothetically if Intel wanted to port their Ice Lake microarchitecture to the RISC-V instruction set, could they do it? Would it be feasible to port an microarchitecture from one instruction set architecture to another?

It's too bad that RISC-V boards are so expensive, that there is nothing like the Raspberry Pi.

[cipri]

Such a huge, and fast improvement in performance, it's just incredible. At this performance, it can be double, or triple the price of the an i9, for me it's already deal done. I'll get it.
It is just huge. It is accelerating the Risc-V perspective a lot. I already can compare it with Tesla. it feels like this is going to be like the "Tesla Model S". The next generation after it will be like the mass market "Model 3".

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/02/08/the-tesla-model-3-was-the-best-selling-luxury-car-in-america-last-year-infographic

Downplaying this performance sounds to me, like the people downplaying tesla in the early years.