If the growing number of new RISC-V announcements aren't enough proof of the license-free protocol's momentum, there is a mountain of analyst predictions, trend research, and market analysis that seems to be getting ever more optimistic about the space.
embeddedcomputing.com, Aug. 21, 2024 –
Research firm Omdia recently forecast that RISC-V-based processor shipments could increase by nearly 50 percent per year until 2030. Although it seems likely that the largest RISC-V opportunities will be in the Automotive and Industrial sectors, it looks like AI applications will be driving that growth in almost every vertical.
"The rise of AI, the increase in use cases and capabilities, means a lot of new territory is being revealed and all of it has potential for RISC-V," said Edward Wilford, Senior Principal Analyst for IoT, Omdia. "The growth of RISC-V is concurrent with the rise of AI and especially edge AI, and that will provide a massive opportunity for ISA."
With AI in the driver's seat, it's no surprise that many recent RISC-V announcements have centered on advance intelligent capabilities and applications.
In a recent announcement, SiFive has announced a new RISC-V processor tailored for datacenter applications with AI workloads. The SiFive Performance P870-D datacenter processor is reportedly designed for parallelizable infrastructure workloads, and the company says that when it's used in combination with products from the SiFive Intelligence product family, datacenter architects will be able to build high-performance, energy efficient compute subsystems for AI-powered applications.
The P870-D supports the open AMBA CHI protocol to allow users to scale the number of clusters, and boost performance while minimizing power consumption. By harnessing a standard CHI bus, SiFive said, the P870-D can scale up to 256 cores using protocols like Compute Express Link (CXL) and CHI chip to chip (C2C) to enable coherent high core count heterogeneous SoCs and chiplet configurations.
"SiFive brings a clean, modern approach to the AI era with our broad portfolio of RISC-V solutions. The new P870-D enhances our proven performance architecture to bring new levels of performance, flexibility, and scalability ," said John Ronco, SVP of Product, SiFive. "The full solution offering from SiFive... combined with our intelligence processors for dedicated AI compute makes it easy for our customers to achieve the most effective performance/watt/dollar metrics on AI and Datacenter workloads"
The P870-D processor is sampling to lead customers now with a final production release by the end of 2024.