Intel to Adopt SiFive's New High-Performance P550 RISC-V Cores with 7nm Platform | Hacker News Reader

Intel to Adopt SiFive's New High-Performance P550 RISC-V Cores with 7nm Platform

tomshardware.com

91 pointsItsTotallyOn30 comments

Let's hope it won't be locked up behind AMI BIOS, Intel's UEFI or ME firmware.

Yeah, it's a fool's wish but hopefully RISC-V and SiFive stay as open as they've been, if they do Intel's cash could really usher in a golden age for open computing

If Microsoft jumps in you can 100% count on that nonsense being bolted in addition to ACPI.

So what? still better than "stuck with a kernel that's never updated, ever" ARM.

The point is we shouldn't be bolting legacy PC baggage to non PC platforms so Microsoft can effortlessly port Windows while enabling silent installs of malicious software. Instead we should be focusing on minimal, secure solutions such as coreboot or skiboot (https://open-power.github.io/skiboot/doc/index.html)

I'd like to remind you of some recent events around Apple M1.

I don't follow Apple news as I don't own or buy Apple products.

That's not my fault.

Reads like the Onion, Intel and RISC in the same line. Good news for RISC-V though.

Intel had some nice RISC processors, the i860 (used in HPC accelerators and the NeXTdimension color graphics card in the early '90s), i960 (used in many laser printers) and the XScale (next generation StrongARM, technology acquired from DEC, back then the fastest ARM CPU).

Unfortunately, they killed them all...

I've written software for all three, plus most of the more peculiar TI DSPs and 'graphics' processors.

I dearly miss all of the crazy ecosystems.

I miss that Intel iAPX 432 failed as a project, it looked like a great design (it was CISC tough)

The i960 was the iAPX 432 redone as a RISC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960

Later versions had the object-oriented / security features stripped out.

Forgot about the linage, thanks for brigging it up.

Intel sold off their X-Scale/StrongARM to Marvell in 2006. https://www.theregister.com/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/ I was with Marvell at the time and we were pretty excited to get it.

What happened to it since?

edit: not snark, genuinely know nothing about these things.

I think the last Marvell SoCs based on XScale were part of the PXA3xx series, which came out in 2006. Since then, the ARMv5TE core of the XScale (the original StrongARM uses the ARMv4 architecture) has been replaced by more recent ARM cores (ARMv7). Details can be found on wikipedia as usual (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale).

The StrongARM and XScale were the basis of so many interesting products in the late 1990s and early 2000s, e.g. some Acorn RISC PCs, the Apple Newton 2000, the Philips IS2630 Inferno phone, Psion's series 7/Netbook, the first Compaq iPaq series and other Windows CE-based PDAs (many of which were the first mobile devices Linux was ported to), and the Netwinder network computer (which still has its own web page - http://www.netwinder.org).

The LART by TU Delft was an open source hardware project based on the StrongARM (https://web.archive.org/web/20060207043722/http://www.lart.t...) and the Itsy was a prototype handheld device developed by DEC WRL to prototype mobile applications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itsy_Pocket_Computer).

Good times...

Thanks for the detailed reply!

The i860 did not live up to expectations - it was a VLIW design and much like the Itanium design which followed, the platform was largely sank by the inability of compilers to generate code that made full use of the chip.

https://www.realworldtech.com/intel-history-lesson/3/

There's an imperative for Intel to look less moribund and conveniently RISC-V has the potential to knobble the competition. So this all looks much more promising.

You think they're betting on it to just skip ARM and for it to be the next big thing? One thing I'm confused about: Does SiFive "own" the RISC-V IP and is just publishing it under open licences at the moment, or are they just the biggest and most promising company to work with it ATM?

SiFive doesn't own or control the RISC-V instruction set. It owns some CPU core designs it has developed, in the same way that Apple owns the M1 chip but doesn't own the ARM ISA.

ARM and Nvidia and the others. I wouldn't get into ARM if I were Intel.

Does anyone really trust Intel to deliver on 7nm in a timely manner? Who's going to bet their business on it?

Even under new management it will take time to sort out the dysfunction and replace lost talent.

> The Performance P270 slots in as the lower-performance eight-stage, dual-issue, in-order processor that supports RISC-V Vector Extension v1.0, which SiFive says makes it an ideal candidate to replace SIMD architectures.

I did not understand this part. "lower-performance" and "in-order" suggest this is a simpler processor, but it could replace SIMD? is SIMD used in embedded contexts?

(asking for clarification, not trying to suggest the article is wrong.)

RISC-V Vector is a form of SIMD. So this is a simple(ish) processor but you can lots of calculation because of the SIMD.

Yes, it is used in embedded context, processing of input from sensor for example. Local machine learning is all the hype right now.

"Edge Computing" is the typical buzz word.

Out of order execution requires a ton of logic (you're basically adding a small optimizing compiler in silicon). This takes a bunch of area and leads to more complicated data paths. The reason high performance cores use it is that it greatly reduces pipeline stalls, and as such can make your cpu several times faster.

I wonder how many ARM cores are built into a typical PC motherboard and other components these days.

A while ago, there was an announcement by, I think, Western Digital, that they were going to replace the ARMs in their HDDs with RISC V.

WD is a very active contributor to RISC-V, some of their "SweRV" RISC-V cores are open source: https://github.com/westerndigitalcorporation/swerv_eh1

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