SiFive: The road ahead (post layoffs)
sifive.com
sifive.com
Clearly something has, but this provides no real clues. Completely counterproductive. But all is good as SiFive will revolutionize computing in ways we have not yet begun to imagine!
I'd be so excited if I could buy a chip and a motherboard and just drop them into a standard ATX case. But I don't think there exists a consumer-purchaseable RISC-V or ARM chip that isn't a whole system on a chip.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/18/adlink-ampere-altra-...
https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/06/30/64-core-risc-v-mothe...
Unless it's for curiosity, then that makes sense to me.
The only thing Apple Silicon improved on is battery life/power consumption/thermals and yet there are lots of people who think it's better across the board despite faster x86 chips existing on the market.
I think excitement about architecture among end users is often not based in reality as the whole point of operating systems and high level languages is to abstract it all away.
Why are people into ham radio or trains or mechanical watches? Some people just find stuff neat.
I don't have any practical use for a RISC-V mobo that an x64 system couldn't handle. I just think it's cool. It excites me.
But here is why I'm excited about RISC-V: I write my software in C, and I want it to be as portable as possible. RISC-V is something different that will exercise new issues when my code is tested on it.
It's a dumb reason, yes. But I want a 32-bit chip and a 64-bit chip for testing. I want to have a server rack full of different chips with different architectures, RISC-V included, and set up a commit pipeline that kicks off a massive test suite on all of the VM's on those machines, running different OS's.
I want to test my code on hundreds of OS/arch platform sets.
RISC-V is a different architecture with different things. I want it.
When a firm pays Arm a licensing fee for the Arm ISA that fee helps support the development of the Arm ISA.
When someone who works for SiFive or Tenstorrent etc works on the development of the RISC-V ISA, they are being paid and those costs will be recovered through the price paid for the products they sell. Others may use the ISA at zero cost but someone is paying.
Now you could argue that costs will be lower in aggregate because of greater competition, but the cost isn't zero in total.
> You're paying for [...], not the ISA
https://pricebaba.com/mobile/pricelist/low-cost-phones-in-in...
Sadly, it's impossible to estimate the relative cost without knowing the ISA licensing terms, and I haven't been able to find anything.
Yes, and that is the market where RISC-V is actually appealing. Once you go higher end, the appeal of a no license cost ISA rapidly drops off and stops being a significant factor.
So anyway, the reason is whenever risc-v makes sense to switch to for cost and performance, I think I'll do it at that time. There is no reason I can see for me to think about it until then. Literally it's going to be exactly the same for me except maybe doing something like `apt install somepkg-risc-v` for some packages and I'm pretty sure that will be the only thing different for me.
Makes sense now or still confused?
It's limited ports wise (has a single nvme slot, but a ton of networking) and if you want to use it for a desktop you need to replace the noisy fan that comes with it. But I can actually be done.
It's the only board I'm aware of though.
Somehow I doubt it though.
Sure, but could LLMs actually come up with the idea of laying people off? That's where that CEO magic is.
One good consequence of generative "AI" might be that real people start discounting meaningless bafflegab marketing prose as automated nonsense, even if it was deliberately composed by a human. Which in turn might drive PR-type people to learn to write meaningful English.
Incidentally, I thought GPT3's summary of the post (upthread) was rather good.
Except you. And you guys. We don't even know you any more.
I think the real dispute is how the opcode space and code density will evolve when more and more extension will need to be added. Will more 32 opcode space and 64 bit instructions but no 16 and no 48 bit instructions in the longterm be a better choice than fewer 32 bit insrructions, but 16/48/64 bit instructions?
On the flip side, a 48-bit instruction takes FIVE bits just to specify the length which is a massive amount of overhead.
I think 64-bit instructions which contain between 1 and 4 instructions (not VLIW as no ILP is specified) would be a better solution offering more compressed instructions and much lower length encoding overhead for 48 and 64-bit instructions while still leaving a potential opening for very long instructions composed of several 64-bit groups. This beats out the Qualcomm proposal in terms of cache, code density, fusion, jumping, and many more without losing any of the benefits of compressed instructions (in fact, it increases the compression benefits).
SiFive claims nearly A78 performance in half the die area. In wearables, this represents a lot of savings in area and probably in power consumption too. This is another move Apple might make as ISA backward-compatibility isn't very important in that market while cost and power are.
https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1415395415000817664
Great way to undermine your credibility.
A78 on SD845 used 64kb L1 vs 32kb L1 on P670 (a 32kb variant is available, but would get significantly worse performance relative to P670). Likewise, other things like the uop cache and 32-bit frontend add a lot to the size/power of A78 as ARM themselves bragged that their frontend got 75% smaller when they dropped the uop cache and 32-bit support in newer mid-core designs. I'd guess this frontend difference alone accounts for most of the area difference between the two.
If you have a super embedded system where your clock speed is tied to your memory frequency in a way where that's the limiting factor then performance/frequency can be a useful metic, but not in any system with caches.
But in all seriousness, I think RISC-V takes over the low- and mid-segments of embedded, industrial and maybe automotive SoCs
I don't know what is the motive, but clearly that Patrick guy is creating doubts and he seems to be pretty good at that. Maybe just another big mouth who wasted way too much time in some fancy corporate PR department?
He was the Devil's right-hand man. SiFive is lost..
( joking but only half-joking )
How much does a company need to suffer before a board builds enough numbers to kick out a person holding those 3 roles
If I didn't otherwise know about the lay-offs it would to me paint an entirely misleading picture, it only hints at redundancies with euphemisms:
> need to realign our operations
> a need to refocus our priorities
> The resulting restructuring
And that's it, no other mention, not even an oblique one.
And yet the article is full of things like:
> SiFive today is in tremendous shape
> SiFive’s growth has never been stronger
It just comes across as complete bullshit? There's no sense of communicating difficulties, or any sense of humility. Just a lot of "Hoo hah aren't we amazing!".
This is written for other c-suite level people and board members, and sadly this hollow pointless communication is the norm for the c-suite and board members. They are not smart people, they don't use language to communicate important information, they don't make choices based on what is best for shareholders, employees, customers or society, they have no useful skill or insight. They are worse than politicians, they hurt shareholders, customers, employees and society. The only people they help are the politically connected Ivy League class, and they are a blight on society.
They're basically quotable material for the media. I don't think any ordinary person actually reads these and takes them sincerely; at least I hope not.
If there's any difficulties, that would be financial, no? Does SiFive publish any financial reports? And if so, do those show the company is in financial trouble? Are there well-informed insiders claiming so?
Unless that, I'll take the company CEO's word for it. Who writes:
"We are very well funded for years to come, with engaged, highly supportive investors, and we are realizing revenues and compounding royalties from many of the world’s leading semiconductor companies."
There. So if no money trouble, then what?
RISC-V ecosystem growth slowing down? No. SiFive's customers shopping elsewhere? Seems unlikely. Portfolio growing stale/uncompetitive? Hardly. Revenues not (yet?) matching expenses? Who knows. It's a young company still, in a rapidly evolving market.
More likely imho: SiFive transitioning from seed stage -> investment rounds & rapid growth -> some kind of 'maintenance mode'.
They have an IP portfolio now. So developing that is done. And decided to re-adjust the size of their workforce to better fit what's needed near-future. Leaving 'just' 100s of highly skilled people to work on SiFive's next products.
All in all, looks more like a storm in a glass of water to me. It's sad for the people who were laid off, but they'll have good opportunities elsewhere.
Or (their business) not growing as rapidly as they planned or expected and so they have fallen short on their own financial projections and need to adjust.
Need to be careful not to conflate SiFive with RISC-V (despite the best efforts of this blog post to do so). They have made their own decisions as to where to compete and that may or may not be the right strategy.
SiFive's success or otherwise has implications for RISC-V but RISC-V being a success doesn't imply SiFive will be.
Perhaps if you knew semiconductor IP business, you would not say this. It is never done.
Stop creating or improving new IPs, and you'll become irrelevant.
What would be the prompt?
SiFive Update - October 26, 2023
After years of growth, SiFive has reassessed its strategies and operations to focus on the most promising opportunities, leading to a restructuring. We believe this change is essential for our continued growth and industry leadership.
We are financially stable and continue to secure revenues and royalties from leading semiconductor companies. We are focused on maintaining our technological edge with investments in advanced R&D.
We recently launched the SiFive Performance P870 and SiFive Intelligence X390 products. Our commitment to our four product families: Essential, Intelligence, Performance, and Automotive remains strong, targeting sectors such as AI, ADAS, Electric Vehicles, Wearables, and Mobile.
With the increasing industry emphasis on AI and the need for adaptability in product design, SiFive aims to offer products that cater to these evolving needs.
SiFive has restructured to increase our agility, strengthen partnerships, and maintain our leadership in the RISC-V domain.
Regards,
Patrick
https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html
The Road Ahead discusses the progress and future of RISC-V and SiFive. RISC-V has grown rapidly from a basic ISA to powering high-performance applications. SiFive has also expanded significantly but recently restructured to focus on the most promising opportunities like AI. While this caused speculation, the CEO explains they remain well-funded and committed to delivering the best RISC-V products. As AI is integrated everywhere, RISC-V is becoming critical for its flexibility and ability to meet power and performance needs. SiFive will continue driving the RISC-V revolution across industries like mobile, automotive and datacenters. The CEO is confident SiFive will revolutionize computing in ways not yet imagined.
This is one of many reasons why investment capitalism is a really poor method of technological development - a better option would be to reduce the control of external investors and adopt a more democratic internal hiring and promotion policy. Unfortunately four decades of neoliberal government and corporate policy has concentrated all the capital in a few hands, and the outsourcing of much of the hardware manufacturing base overseas has resulted in a decrepit technological base.
Thus, I imagine Chinese development of RISC-V is well ahead of whatever SiFive is up to and if they were directly competing, they'd be well behind the curve:
https://techwireasia.com/2023/10/do-risc-v-restrictions-sign...
A similar argument is that the open-source movement has become the main driver of software innovation (Linux in the server space etc.) and that without it we'd still be back in the early 2000s tech-wise.
That works for catching up; not for moving ahead.
> A similar argument is that the open-source movement has become the main driver of software innovation (Linux in the server space etc.) and that without it we'd still be back in the early 2000s tech-wise.
The open source movement exists in this timeline.
and their point is that the open source movement is not driven by capital / neoliberal economics
Research output isn't to do with IP law relaxation. It's also extremely hard to draw conclusions from.
>the outsourcing of much of the hardware manufacturing base overseas has resulted in a decrepit technological base.
This is nonsense. All this shows to me is that you are not aware of the current semiconductor supply chain of which the US is a large member. And I suggest you find out how democratic the "hiring and promotion policy" is in Korea, or how concentrated the wealth is there.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3237339/shenzhen-ch...
I have no doubt that Chinese semiconductor output will increase in quantity and quality. I also have no doubt that it will be sold on the global market for capital and that capital will be the primary way the owners and workers of those companies are rewarded as well as the means used to create and grow the company.
Also, Radio Shack closed down because its customers moved online – that is simple supply and demand.
Oh yeah they're dead.
Ah, so they did it for more money, not to save the company. Good to know. I feel they could have written a few more hollow words to their ex-coworkers though
Or maybe they're just not planning on growing, which is a brave strategy in the tech world.
1. Revenues are not as high as needed. If the current trajectory continues they will run out of money.
2. Therefore they need to change the plan. Changing the plan involves firing a load of people.
3. Everyone assumes (correctly) that that is because they are not doing so well.
4. Post a reassuring blog post that everything is fine. SiFive depends on customer confidence.
They probably are well funded for years (2?) to come. And they may be in "tremendous shape" *assuming that their new plan goes as they hope. It does seem a little desperate though. No information on how their new plan is different at all.
Wearables?
They're doomed.
I was 100% sure SiFive was the future until I read that. Wearables?
They're doomed.
I feel like companies often think they're always going up an exponential curve rather than breaching the top of the 'S' and you really need to plan for the long term health of your company. This company obviously hasn't
They must have used BS-GPT to write that letter.
So... it seems the effect of the post is to further piss off the departed and give the general impression the CEO is incompetent.
Any guesses what they wanted to achieve with this piece of marketing?
Sure. They're hoping to sell the company. To whom I'm not sure. It wasn't an appeal to any specific customers, but a lot about how great the company is and what a great position they're in. So that must be what they're selling - the company.
It’s the business equivalent of that non-techie relative who flips random settings and downloads random software in response to some computer issue.
Hopefully, we will be able to allow SiFive to fail gracefully and the architecture will keep going.
On the low end, there is a vibrant ecosystem of chips and IP providers, and SiFive is actually increasingly uncompetitive. This seems to be where the money really is, but it doesn't make SiFive excited. This market doesn't get cited on HN.
Everything SiFive does is about RISC-V. Everything that's important about RISC-V is not done by SiFive. (And if Qualcomm wins the current pissing contest for the future of the ISA, nothing that's important about RISC-V will be about SiFive, and that's fine. Qualcomm's ideas for the future are certainly better.)
Also SiFive: let’s layoff engineers and reduce our engineering capacity
Sounds credible.
First everyone over-hired during covid since everyone else was, then everyone started laying them off after since they never knew why they hired them to begin with and everyone else is laying off anyway
Or they did come up with the realization that this Big Tech is toxic for humanity and do invest in stuff in attempt to clean up the mess, for instance trying to make RISC-V a success, that on the worldwide non-free modern ISA issue?
maybe because Vanguard is famous for Index funds and it's funds follow index like S&P 500
You often even get new indices specifically created to be easy to invest in (instead of optimizing for the older goal of being some measure of overall market performance.)
Vanguard and Blackrock don't necessarily dislike that their hands are bound with the indices. That avoids lots of thorny political problems.