SiFive offers potential Neoverse N2 rival – the P870-D RISC-V core for datacenters

SiFive has announced the launch of its latest core for datacenters, the P870-D, and claims it has a leg up on Arm's Neoverse N2 in density for AI. The P870-D is a datacenter-focused variant of the RISC-V-powered P870 core, which debuted about a year ago. The main upgrades for the P870-D include its rest capability, error …

[Fazal Majid]

China

China is the elephant in the room. They have been burned by US sanctions and adopting RISC-V as it is an open standard not subject to US sanctions (although SiFive may be). If the US blocks SiFive exports, they can just switch to another RISC-V provider, including home-grown ones, something not possible with x64 or arm64.

[Justthefacts]

Re: China

Sigh.

“SiFive has modeled out the P870-D characteristics on TSMC's 3nm”. That’s so cute, LOL. I’ve “modelled” my roll-your-own core on 0.1nm technology; not only does it beat everyone else in power and performance, but it has 100% yield, and works on first spin with zero IR droop on all process corners. Oh, you were expecting *measured proof results* on real silicon….me myself having paid upwards of $2bn of my own money for the mask-sets first four silicon spins, such that *you* will have perfect silicon first time. Ummm, no, I was hoping you’d do that? What’s that, you don’t want to pay me for the privilege of debugging $2bn worth of development costs on my core? Why not?

What a load of total muppets.

[Groo The Wanderer]

Things are progressing nicely on the R5 front; at this rate, I expect some vendor or vendors to be producing chips that are fully competitive with AMD, Intel, and ARM within 5 years.