SiFive intros new SiFive Performance P870-D, a new RISC-V processor with up to 256 cores

SiFive has just announced its new SiFive Performance P870-D, a new RISC-V processor with up to 256 cores, designed for data center applications.

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The new SiFive Performance P870-D continues the journey for the company from its regular P870, which had a six-wide out-of-order core with an RVA23 profile of the RISC-V instruction set architecture with vector and vector crypto processing acceleration.

The new P870-D adds an open AMBA CHI bridge for energy-efficient cross-cluster communications (each of the clusters has 1-4 cores with shared L2 cache) as well as cross-cluster reliability, and serviceability (RAS) features that enable building CPUs with up to 256 cores, all aimed at mission-critical applications.

In order to build huge 256-core RISC-V processors, chip designers will need to license Ncore cache coheran network-on-chip from Arteris. The new SiFive Performance P870-D will allow CPU designs that are equal to what AMD and Intel have, but in energy efficiency, the RISC-V architecture has some really nice tricks up its sleeve.

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John Ronco, SiFive SVP of Product, said: "The new P870-D enhances our proven Performance architecture to bring new levels of performance, flexibility, and scalability. The full solution offering from SiFive - including software, IOMMU, interrupt controller, and other uncore blocks - 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".

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Michal Siwinski, CMO of Arteris, explains: "Network-on-Chip IP significantly helps streamline the process of building complex, multi-core heterogeneous SoCs with the lowest latency and high bandwidth to accommodate AI workloads. We are pleased to continue the collaboration with SiFive, enabling the ecosystem to create high-performance and low-power RISC-V-based systems on time and budget while reducing risk".

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Right now, SiFive is providing samples of its new P870-D to select customers, wtih full production of samples expected before the end of the year. As for the first processors based on the P870-D, we'll be waiting until 2025.