SiFive Details New Performance P650 RISC-V Core

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SiFive Details New Performance P650 RISC-V Core

Back in October SiFive teased a new performance-optimized RISC-V core and today they finally shared more public details on this Performance P650 core...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...rformance-P650

[kvuj]

Does anyone know if RISC-V has extensions planned for memory tagging or similar mechanism? I think I remember hearing about TIMBER-V but I can't find much information on it.

[mbello]

SiFive should partner with Raspberry Pi foundation to have its cores on all coming RPi boards. Putting millions of cheap RISC V boards in the hands of tinkerers is a good way for architecture to gain widespread software support.
Support is always a vague term, it is not only about whether it works, but how solid/reliable it is, whether key software pieces have been optimized for it, etc.
All that depends on having a large user community.

[iskra32]

SiFive should partner with Raspberry Pi foundation to have its cores on all coming RPi boards. Putting millions of cheap RISC V boards in the hands of tinkerers is a good way for architecture to gain widespread software support.
Support is always a vague term, it is not only about whether it works, but how solid/reliable it is, whether key software pieces have been optimized for it, etc.
All that depends on having a large user community.

Might be easier to do that with another SBC manufacturer. The Raspberry Pi Foundation for all of it's good aspects is essentially tied to Broadcom.

[Alexmitter]

SiFive should partner with Raspberry Pi foundation to have its cores on all coming RPi boards. Putting millions of cheap RISC V boards in the hands of tinkerers is a good way for architecture to gain widespread software support.
Support is always a vague term, it is not only about whether it works, but how solid/reliable it is, whether key software pieces have been optimized for it, etc.
All that depends on having a large user community.

SiFive is not a SoC manufacturer, they are a design house and their cores are example implementations of the instruction set. All their SoC products are tech demos and are not made for the mass market.

[tildearrow]

The progress of RISC-V performance seems to be very... fast.
Impressive considering the architecture isn't that old.

[CTown]

SiFive should partner with Raspberry Pi foundation to have its cores on all coming RPi boards. Putting millions of cheap RISC V boards in the hands of tinkerers is a good way for architecture to gain widespread software support.
Support is always a vague term, it is not only about whether it works, but how solid/reliable it is, whether key software pieces have been optimized for it, etc.
All that depends on having a large user community.

That would be very interesting, as that will give them scale to lower prices. Still, what GPU would be used in that case?

[microcode]

SiFive is not a SoC manufacturer, they are a design house and their cores are example implementations of the instruction set. All their SoC products are tech demos and are not made for the mass market.

That's not really accurate. The cores are actually marketed to SoC integrators, and they've set up a whole thing to help integrators get to fab. None of the SiFive cores previously mass produced were high performance, but they are in mass market products already. This core could easily fit into mass market products.

[PerformanceExpert]

The progress of RISC-V performance seems to be very... fast.
Impressive considering the architecture isn't that old.

Let's ignore that it doesn't have a vector extension which would make any comparison with Cortex-A77 highly speculative. But what I'd like to know is whether anyone has proof of any OoO core from SiFive that has made it into silicon or even better, an actual product?

So far the progress you're talking about exists on powerpoint slides only.

[marios]

The progress of RISC-V performance seems to be very... fast.
Impressive considering the architecture isn't that old.

It is not so impressive. It would be more impressive if it was mature.
At least from sifive, there is no performant board yet (remember all released boards have an in-order cpu, which means poor performance).
There are still lots of low hanging fruits to grab (OoO, prefetchers, branch predictors, etc.). When they run out of low hanging fruits, the progress in performance will be way slower.

tl;dr: It is easier to get faster when you are slow...