SiFive puts its whole Risc-V processor range into Intel’s foundry service

Risc-V processor IP company SiFive is partnering with Intel Foundry Services (IFS) to optimise SiFive IP for Intel’s foundry customers.

The two companies have already collaborated, using SiFive’s ‘Performance P550‘ processor and Intel PCIe and DDR interfaces to build the ‘Horse Creek’ Risc-V development platform.

“We’re excited to extend our relationship with IFS to ensure the full SiFive Risc-V processor portfolio is available to IFS customers, including the recently-announced Performance P650 processor,” according to SiFive. P650 “extends Risc-V into new markets including automotive, AI/ML, client computing, data centre and mobile”.

Announced in December, SiFive claims the P650 will have 40% more performance per clock cycle that the P550 – up to 11+SPECInt2006/GHz – and has architecture enhancements improve maximum clock frequency – together adding to 50% performance gain over the P550.

Performance can be scaled, with sixteen cores in a coherent complex, platform-level memory management and interrupt control being the maximum configuration. Support is included for the Risc-V hypervisor extension for virtualisation.