RISC-V has emerged as a cornerstone of modern computing, offering an open-source alternative to proprietary designs like ARM and x86. Free from licensing fees and highly extensible, RISC-V powers everything from IoT devices to AI accelerators, with over 13 billion cores shipped globally. Annual RISC-V Summits, organized… Read More
SiFive, founded by the original creators of the RISC-V instruction set, has become the leading independent supplier of RISC-V processor IP. More than two billion devices already incorporate SiFive designs, ranging from camera controllers and SSDs to smartphones and automotive systems. The company no longer sells its own chips,… Read More
ARM’s Quiet Coup in DPUs
The datacenter is usually framed as a contest between CPUs (x86, ARM, RISC-V) and GPUs (NVIDIA, AMD, custom ASICs). But beneath those high-profile battles, another silent revolution has played out: ARM quietly displaced Intel and AMD in the Data Processing Unit (DPU) market.
DPUs — also called SmartNICs… Read More
Dan is joined by Jack Kang of SiFive. As a member of the founding team at SiFive, Jack oversees the Business Development, Customer Experience, and Corporate Marketing groups. He is responsible for strategic business initiatives and partnerships, technical pre-sales activities and post-sales support, and corporate messaging… Read More
Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) is an open specification that defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package. The objective is to enable an open chiplet ecosystem. Although the initial specification for UCIe was developed by Intel, a consortium was announced in March with Intel, AMD, Arm, Google,… Read More
Alphawave IP has agreed to acquire OpenFive, a SiFive business unit (formerly Open-Silicon) for $210m in cash. Having spent many years in the ASIC business which included working with Open-Silicon, Alphawave, and OpenFive here is my perspective on the acquisition:
This acquisition accomplishes two things: First it trims down… Read More
Exciting times for the semiconductor industry! Last week Intel announced a billion dollar fund to build a foundry ecosystem and today Intel announced they are acquiring foundry Tower Semiconductor for $5.6 billion dollars, WOW! Some people doubted Intel’s commitment to the foundry market this time. I think we can now put that… Read More
Operating systems and Instruction Set Architectures (ISA) can have long lifespans, and I’ve been an engineering user of many ISAs since the 1970s. For mobile devices I’ve followed the rise to popularity of the ARM architecture, and then more recently the RISC-V ISA which has successfully made the leap from university… Read More
80% of specification optimization and almost 100% of the performance/power trade-offs can be achieved during architecture exploration of product design. RISC-V offers a huge opportunity with lots of pipeline and instruction set enhancement opportunities. Can it really attain the utopian success that people are looking… Read More
During the week of April 19th, Linley Group held its Spring Processor Conference 2021. The Linley Group has a reputation for convening excellent conferences. And this year’s spring conference was no exception. There were a number of very informative talks from various companies updating the audience on the latest research and… Read More
