SiFive Raises RISC-V performance bar with New Best-in-Class SiFive Performance P650 Processor

[TheLostSwede]

SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced the availability of the SiFive Performance P650 processor, the new range-topping member of the SiFive Performance family, which is expected to be the fastest licensable RISC-V processor IP core in the market. The SiFive Performance P650 will enable RISC-V designs for performance-demanding application processor markets from data center to edge, automotive, compute, mobile and more.

"SiFive's mission is to answer the semiconductor industry's call for more processor IP choices. SiFive is singularly focused on bringing innovative processor technology based on the RISC-V architecture to market," said Dr. Yunsup Lee, co-founder and CTO, SiFive. "Since the announcement of the Performance Series of RISC-V cores earlier this year, SiFive has continued to push the limits of what was previously possible with RISC-V. The SiFive Performance P650 processor IP represents our commitment towards relentless execution, delivering significant performance improvements in record time. This announcement is the next step towards our long-term vision of bringing RISC-V processors to all performance-hungry applications."



The SiFive Performance P650 processor builds upon the SiFive Performance P550 processor, maintaining an efficient core pipeline while expanding the processor instruction-issue width to deliver an impressive 40% performance increase per clock cycle. Additional architecture enhancements improve maximum clock frequency, achieving an overall 50% performance gain compared to SiFive's previous fastest processor. With a projected score of 11+ SPECInt2006/GHz, the SiFive Performance P650 brings RISC-V into a new category of high-end computing applications. The SiFive Performance P650 is scalable to sixteen cores using a coherent multicore complex, complete with essential system components such as platform-level memory management and interrupt control units, and supports the new RISC-V hypervisor extension for virtualization. SiFive will offer an "Architecture Preview" to select lead customers, for evaluation of the SiFive Performance P650 ahead of general availability.

"The introduction of the SiFive Performance P650 processor IP, coming so quickly on the heels of the SiFive Performance P550 processor, shows how devoted SiFive is to driving the RISC-V processor architecture deep into the data center and applications with similar high-performance requirements," said Steve Leibson, Principal Analyst at TIRIAS Research. "The company's announced plans for 16-core, coherent processor complexes based on this IP will deliver considerable computing performance and requires the commitment of significant development resources, which are simply out of reach for many other companies playing in the RISC-V processor IP arena."

"With the new SiFive Performance P650 processor, SiFive's engineering team has rapidly and successfully delivered a significant performance uplift for the SiFive processor family," said Rohit Kumar, Senior Vice President of Engineering, SiFive. "SiFive's rapid execution and expertise is on display as we build world-class products and serve high-performance markets. At SiFive, we're determined to push the envelope of performance and demonstrate RISC-V has no limits, and the SiFive Performance P650 is the next step in a far-reaching product development roadmap."

The SiFive Performance P650 Architecture Preview will be offered to lead customers in Q1 of 2022 with general availability coming mid-year. Dr. Lee will discuss future product direction and the SiFive Performance P650 during a keynote presentation at the upcoming RISC-V Summit 2021, held December 6-8 in-person at the Moscone Center, and online.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Valantar]

Interesting! 11+ Spec2006/GHz sounds pretty impressive, considering that something like AMD's mobile Zen3 APUs score in the ~13/GHz range.

Not quite sure of the exact frequencies of the 5980HS here, but if it's anywhere near its 4.8GHz rated boost, that's just 12.8/GHz. 4GHz would be 15.3.

 

[defaultluser]

So boring.

By the time you add inn the high cost of developing a cache-coherent interconnect that can scale to that many cores , and all the added costs of high-performance Risc5 math libraries, then you could have just bought an ARM Neoverse server ready-to-ship.

 

[First Strike]

Interesting! 11+ Spec2006/GHz sounds pretty impressive, considering that something like AMD's mobile Zen3 APUs score in the ~13/GHz range.

Not quite sure of the exact frequencies of the 5980HS here, but if it's anywhere near its 4.8GHz rated boost, that's just 12.8/GHz. 4GHz would be 15.3.

P650 is more like a cortex A77. A direct IPC comparison between a hi-freq cpu and a low-freq cpu is not very applicable, since almost all high power processors suffers IPC degradation from high frequency (since memory and other uncore component won't speed up as cpu cores do)

But Sifive did not specify how much L3 is needed for 11 Specint2k6/GHz. It could be 16MB L3 as their advertised maximum L3 capacity. And Specint is somewhat sensitive to cache.

What is interesting is that they managed to rival A77 without vector extensions. It's only a RV64GCB core, next year it would be RVA22 with at least RV64GCVBK

 

[mtcn77]

So boring.

By the time you add inn the high cost of developing a cache-coherent interconnect that can scale to that many cores , and all the added costs of high-performance Risc5 math libraries, then you could have just bought an ARM Neoverse server ready-to-ship.

It is only difficult when it is not available how much disparate instructions are to execute, something risc is more open about.