Is RISC-V at Risk? Intel Might Purchase SiFive for $2B | Hacker News Reader

Is RISC-V at Risk? Intel Might Purchase SiFive for $2B

youtube.com

11 pointstux19688 comments

I struggle to see how such a deal would make sense for anyone. Ok, maybe SiFive founders if they want a pay day now rather than a bigger pay day later on.

Intel doesn't need to buy SiFive to get a license to make RISC-V chips. Anyone is allowed to. Intel doesn't need SiFive technology, unless they're planning to get into microcontrollers and IoT, and even then they can (and already do) simply license cores from SiFive. SiFive's most sophisticated shipping cores are around original Pentium in complexity, with Pentium MMX and Pentium Pro level things announced but not yet shipping. That's 25 years behind Intel. Intel could do an Apple M1-style RISC-V very easily if they want to, but they don't need to buy SiFive to do it -- it wouldn't even make it easier, particularly.

Does it make sense for SiFive or RISC-V? It's hard to see it. Too much risk of getting buried inside the behemoth. It's not even as if Intel can threaten to compete with them and squash them -- SiFive's battle for the foreseeable future is with ARM, not x86, and not an M1-level RISC-V (if Intel wants to make one)

not sure what that bigger pay day down the road would look like for sifive. Intel still has more money than God after failng to deliver new processes & lagging ever further behind for almost half a decade. they can make it worth the while today.

you compare the architecture to a Pentium and frankly I hate to say it but that's probably not an unfair comparison. however at semimodern processes that kind of core can be very small and very power efficient. intel themselves have had a number of ultra low voltage "threshhold" processors based around Pentium like architectures. the Intel Quark lines (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark) was based off the Pentium instruction set, at ultra low voltages, & powered some systems that still, half a decade after introduction & close to end of production are still quite competitive. to my eyes the only reason these chips were abandoned was because intel was used to fast bigger margins, & I think it sad these great chips were abandoned. risc-v has quite a variety of implementations, and I agree that few seem unlikely to be high performance, but that simplicity could quite potentially be a very low power probably highly parallel chip in the making.

It's not disparaging to say that the best RISC-V chips are now similar to Pentium in microarchitecture. Those (and PowerPC 601/603) were great chips in their time.

The current RISC-V chips are using modern process nodes and running at 10x higher clock speeds and the HiFive Unmatched board has modern peripherals such as 16 GB DDR4 RAM, M.2 SSD, current PCIe graphics card, gig ethernet etc.

So it's a far better computer than any Pentium 133 or something like that. Just similar microarchitecture.

Intel is still today basically using the 1995 Pentium Pro microarchitecture, with a few tweaks. The equivalent of that is already announced in RISC-V land, just not shipping until probably next year.

Bummer, just paid for my ITX Dev board too.

Hope they don’t get acquired, but can’t really blame them if they chose to go that route.

Bummer in what way? You got the best RISC-V board that will be available this year.

Bummer as in I don’t trust Intel.

Original source article that the video is referencing:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-10/chipmaker...

Absolutely not. It would be a great move for both.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com