The Performance P670 and P470 RISC-V processors bring improved compute performance and efficiency to support more innovative designs in these high-volume markets.
“The P670 and P470 are specifically designed for, and capable of handling the most demanding workloads for wearables and other advanced consumer applications. These new products offer powerful performance and compute density for companies looking to upgrade from legacy ISAs,” explained Chris Jones, SiFive VP of Product. “We have optimised these new RISC-V Vector enabled products to deliver the performance and efficiency improvements the industry has long been asking for, and we are in evaluations with a number of top-tier customers. Additionally, as the upstream enablement of RISC-V has started within the Android Open Source Project, (AOSP), designers will have much greater choice and flexibility as they consider the positive implications with that platform for future designs.”
Commenting on the release, Todd R. Weiss, an analyst with Futurum Research, said, “These latest and powerful new processors give SiFive feature and performance advantages that will gain plenty of attention from device makers and consumers who want more from their devices. SiFive has been growing its reputation for some time and is truly ready to shake up the marketplace.”
The Performance P470 and P670 products offer a combination of compute-density, power efficiency, and robust feature sets intended for a wide range of applications and markets:
- Support for virtualization, including a separate IOMMU for accelerating virtualized device IO
- Full, Out-of-Order, RISC-V Vector implementation, based on the ratified RISC-V Vector v1.0 Specification
- First to market with the RISC-V Vector Cryptography extensions
- SiFive WorldGuard system security
- Full RISC-V RVA22 profile compliance
- New, Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) compliant interrupt controller, with better support for Message Signal Interrupts (MSI) and virtualization
- Enhanced scalability with fully coherent multi-core, multi-cluster, with support for up to 16 cores
The P650, which excludes the vector unit, is already shipping to lead customers and is being used in applications that do not require the additional capabilities that vector compute offers or are more area constrained.
The P670 contains a number of additional features, including:
- achieves a maximum frequency exceeding 3.4GHz in 5nm,
- has performance of greater than 12 SpecINT2k6/GHz, offering optimised performance in a constrained area and power envelope,
- offers higher single threaded performance and 2x compute density compared to legacy solutions, and
- includes a 2x 128-bit Vector ALUs compliant with the ratified RISC-V Vector v1.0 specification
The Performance P470 is SiFive’s first efficiency-focused Out-of-Order, area optimised, vector processor and is intended for applications like wearables, consumer, and smart home devices. Expanding on the proven P500-Series, it is significantly smaller than competing solutions and optimised to have best-in-class performance efficiency and area density.
The P470 was also designed to serve as a companion to the P670 processor for demanding applications that require a sharing of compute resources while optimising power consumption.
The P470 offers a significant upgrade to legacy efficiency cores, achieving a maximum frequency exceeding 3.4GHz in 5nm, and greater than 8 SpecINT2k6/GHz, within a minimal area and power envelope.
