Back in February 2022 SiFive announced its partnership with Intel Foundry Services (IFS), to bring its "Horse Creek" SoC to market and now SiFive has announced that it's getting ready to launch its first development board on said SoC. This summer, SiFive will launch the HiFive Pro P550 development board, which will kick things up a serious notch when it comes to embedded SoC development boards, regardless of the CPU core the SoC is built around. The HiFive Pro P550 will be one of few microATX based embedded SoC development boards out there and so far, to our knowledge, the only one with a RISC-V based SoC. The Horse Creek SoC sports quad core, 2.2 GHz, 13-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline RISC-V RV64GBC CPU built on the Intel 4 node. The SoC also has a DDR5 5600 MHz memory interface, support for eight lanes of PCIe 5.0 and comes in a 19 x 19 mm FBGA package.

The HiFive Pro P550 will offer 16 GB of DDR5 memory, but based on the render of the motherboard, this is soldered to the board, rather than relying on standard DDR5 DIMMs. Furthermore, the board has two x16 PCIe 3.0 expansion slots, although it's unclear how many PCIe each slot features, as well as a PCIe 3.0 M.2 2280 M-key slot for NVMe SSDs and a PCIe 3.0 M.2 E-key slot for a WiFi/Bluetooth module. The board also sports multiple USB/USB 3.0 ports and even a pair of USB-C ports. The press release also mentions both Gigabit and 10 Gbps Ethernet support, as well as support for onboard graphics and remote system management, without going into any further details. It'll be interesting to see if the Horse Creek SoC can deliver on its expected performance target, especially as SiFive has a lot to prove, especially as the company calls the RISC-V architecture inevitable.

SiFive, Inc., the founder and leader of RISC-V computing, today announced the company will support Intel Foundry Services (IFS) innovation fund's goal to build innovative new RISC-V computing platforms optimized for Intel process technology. The $1B Intel fund will support the creation of disruptive technologies to address modern computing challenges, with the Intel-SiFive collaboration aiming to extend the RISC-V ecosystem. Compute blocks in future silicon chips, optimized for specific classes of workloads, require a vibrant market of semiconductor IP that is further enabled by SiFive's leading RISC-V processor IP optimized and available to customers of IFS. The open nature of the RISC-V instruction set architecture creates freedom to innovate, with specifications and extensions developed by expert contributors from leaders in the semiconductor industry, research institutions, and academia.

SiFive has partnered with IFS to develop a RISC-V development platform, codenamed "Horse Creek," featuring a multi-core SiFive Performance P550 processor, and implemented on the Intel 4 technology platform, on track for availability in 2022. The "Horse Creek" SoC will enable a new generation of RISC-V developer boards, continuing the tradition of SiFive HiFive boards that have helped drive the growth of the RISC-V ecosystem. To be informed of updates on the "Horse Creek" RISC-V developer board, please register here.

SiFive, Inc., the industry leader in RISC-V processors and silicon solutions, today announced launched the new SiFive Performance family of processors. The SiFive Performance family debuts with two new processor cores, the P270, SiFive's first Linux capable processor with full support for the RISC-V vector extension v1.0 rc, and the SiFive Performance P550 core, SiFive's highest performance processor to date. The new SiFive Performance P550 delivers a SPECInt 2006 score of 8.65/GHz, making it the highest performance RISC-V processor available today, and comparable to existing proprietary solutions in the application processor space.

"SiFive Performance is a significant milestone in our commitment to deliver a complete, scalable portfolio of RISC-V cores to customers in all markets who are at the vanguard of SOC design and are dissatisfied with the status quo," said Dr. Yunsup Lee, Co-Founder and CTO of SiFive. "These two new products cover new performance points and a wide range of application areas, from efficient vector processors that easily displace yesterday's SIMD architectures, to the bleeding edge that the P550 represents. SiFive is proud to set the standard for RISC-V processing and is ready to deliver these products to customers today."