SiFive Core IP 7 Series Creates New Class of Embedded Intelligent Devices Powered by RISC-V

Newly unveiled features and continued RISC-V investment in domain-specific architectures enable innovations in 5G, networking, storage, artificial intelligence and sensor fusion

SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 31, 2018 -- SiFive, the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP, today announced the availability of the SiFive Core IP 7 Series, the highest performance commercially available RISC-V cores. The 7 Series product family is designed to enable embedded intelligence with features that have not been commercially available until today. The 7 Series includes the E7, S7 and the U7 series. SiFive Core IP provides a truly heterogenous, customizable architecture that provides customers with the ability to flexibly combine E, S and U cores within a single coherent core complex. Together, the SiFive E7, S7 and U7 Core IP Series will enable the next generation of RISC-V cores that will power 5G, networking, storage, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM), and sensor fusion functionality.

"The SiFive Core IP 7 Series represents a major advancement in RISC-V. The 7 Series brings features to market that have been in-demand but unavailable to customers. SiFive offers the broadest portfolio of RISC-V Core IP with the most power efficient and highest performance cores," said Jack Kang, VP of product marketing, SiFive. "The 7 Series is our latest innovation that will allow designers to achieve higher efficiency by tailoring their core to the characteristics of their domain – from the smallest edge devices to the data center."

The E7 Core IP Series comprises the 32-bit E76 and E76-MC and provides hard real-time capabilities. The SiFive Core IP S7 Series brings high performance 64-bit architectures to the embedded markets with the S76 and S76-MC. The SiFive Core IP U7 Series is a Linux-capable applications processor with a highly configurable memory architecture for domain-specific customization. The 64-bit U74 and U74-MC, like all SiFive U cores, fully support Linux, while the E76, E76-MC, S76 and S76-MC support bare metal environments and real-time operating systems. All new cores offer efficient performance and optimized power consumption, appropriate for supporting smart offloads of data center workloads as well as those of extremely power-efficient edge devices. The U74-MC provides 64-bit addressability for real-time, latency sensitive applications such as 5G baseband processing, enterprise-class storage for fast or big data and multi-mode sensor fusion for AR/VR/SLAM applications.

"We selected SiFive Core IP due to its best-in-class performance as it was one-third the power and one-third the area of competing solutions," said Jihyo Lee, co-founder and CEO, FADU. "As we target our next generation of advanced memory products, we look forward to seeing SiFive's 7 Series Core IP bringing truly heterogenous architectures, customizable 64-bit capability and intelligence to the embedded space."

The SiFive 7 Series provides a compelling feature set that includes scalable throughput provided by 8+1 cores per cluster, 64-bit memory addressability for real-time processors and in-cluster coherent combination of real-time processors and application processors. These features are currently not available from any other CPU IP vendor and are unique to SiFive's Core IP series. The SiFive 7 Series also includes enhanced determinism for hard, real-time constraints and functional safety provided through a combination of built-in fault tolerance mechanisms. The 7 series is designed on a highly optimized 8-stage in-order pipeline, which introduces microarchitectural features to prevent side channel attacks thereby enabling a robust and secure processor implementation.

"We are pushing the throughput and performance limits of latency-sensitive standards and devices," said Yonghua Song, CEO, Bouffalo. "SiFive's E7 allows us to maximize embedded performance. SiFive's 7 Series of Core IP is an important step forward with powerful new features. The flexibility and extensibility of their cores allow us to optimize our architecture and complements our use of their E24."

For more information on SiFive's RISC-V Core IP including full datasheets, specifications and app notes, visit https://www.sifive.com/core-designer.

About SiFive

SiFive is the leading provider of market-ready processor core IP based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture. Led by a team of industry veterans and founded by the inventors of RISC-V, SiFive helps SoC designers reduce time-to-market and realize cost savings with customized, open-architecture processor cores, and democratizes access to optimized silicon by enabling system designers to build customized RISC-V based semiconductors. SiFive is located in Silicon Valley and has venture backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Spark Capital, Osage University Partners and Chengwei Capital, along with strategic partners Huami, SK Telecom, Western Digital and Intel Capital. For more information, visit www.sifive.com.