About six months have passed since the SiFive announcement of the Performance P550 “fastest 64-bit RISC-V processor” ever, and the company has now introduced an even faster RISC-V core with the Performance P650 that’s expected to match Cortex-A77 performance.
Building upon the Performance P550 design, the SiFive Performance P650 is scalable to sixteen cores using a coherent multicore complex, and delivers a 40% performance increase per clock cycle based on SiFive engineering estimated performance in SPECInt2006/GHz, thanks to an expansion of the processor’s instruction-issue width. The company compares P650 to the Arm family by saying it “maintains a significant performance-per-area advantage compared to the Arm Cortex-A77”.
SiFive Performance P650 key features:
- 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GCB) core Sv39/Sv48 Virtual Memory Support
- Multi-core, multi-cluster processor configurations with up to 16 cores
- Performance > 11 SpecINT2006/GHz
- Thirteen stage, four-issue, out-of-order pipeline tuned for scalable performance
- Private L2 Caches and Streaming Prefetcher for improved memory performance
- Cache stashing to L3 for tightly coupled accelerators
- SECDED ECC with Error Reporting
- Hypervisor Extension and System Level Virtualization IP
- SiFive WorldGuard System Security
Other architecture enhancements over the previous generation include a higher maximum clock frequency (Liliputing says up to 3.5 GHz), platform-level memory management, interrupt control units, and support for the new RISC-V hypervisor extension for virtualization.
SiFive will offer an “Architecture Preview” to select lead customers in Q1 2022 for evaluation of the SiFive Performance P650 with a development kit including RTL evaluation, test bench RTL, a software development kit, an FPGA bitstream, and documentation.
General availability for the Performance P650 is expected in Q2 2022. The cores should be used in SoCs targeting a variety of markets from data center to edge, automotive, compute, mobile, and more. More details may be found on the product page.
Via SiFive press release.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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