SiFive highlights key inflection points driving RISC-V adoption for AI

SiFive Inc. has announced the SiFive Intelligence XM Series designed for accelerating high-performance AI workloads. This is the first IP from SiFive to include a highly scalable AI matrix engine, which accelerates time to market for semiconductor companies building system on chip solutions for edge IoT, consumer devices, next generation electric and/or autonomous vehicles, data centers, and beyond.

As part of SiFive’s commitment to supporting its customers and the broader RISC-V ecosystem, SiFive also announced its intention to open source a reference implementation of its SiFive Kernel Library (SKL).

Executives also discussed the leadership role the RISC-V architecture is playing at the core of AI solutions across a diverse range of market leaders, and provided an update on SiFive’s strategy, roadmap and business momentum.

SiFive’s new XM Series offers an extremely scalable and efficient AI compute engine. By integrating scalar, vector, and matrix engines, XM Series customers can take advantage of very efficient memory bandwidth. The XM Series also continues SiFive’s legacy of offering extremely high performance per watt for compute-intensive applications.

“Many companies are seeing the benefits of an open processor standard while they race to keep up with the rapid pace of change with AI. AI plays to SiFive’s strengths with performance per watt and our unique ability to help customers customize their solutions,” said Patrick Little, CEO of SiFive. “We are already supplying our RISC-V solutions to five of the ‘Magnificent 7’ companies, and as companies pivot to a ‘software first’ design strategy we are working on new AI solutions with a wide variety of companies from automotive to datacenter and the intelligent edge and IoT.”

RISC-V was originally developed to efficiently support specialized computing engines including mixed-precision operations,” said Krste Asanovic, SiFive Founder and Chief Architect. “This, coupled with the inclusion of efficient vector instructions and the support of specialized AI extensions, are the reasons why many of the largest datacenter companies have already adopted RISC-V AI accelerators.”

Krste introduced more details on the new XM Series which broadens its Intelligence Product family. The XM Series also continues SiFive’s legacy of offering extremely high performance per watt for compute-intensive applications. Featuring four X-Cores per cluster, a cluster can deliver 16 TOPS (INT8) or 8 TFLOPS (BF16) per GHz. 

There is 1TB/s of sustained memory bandwidth per XM Series cluster, with the clusters being able to access memory via a high bandwidth port or via a CHI port for coherent memory access. SiFive envisions the creation of systems incorporating no host CPU or ones based on RISC-V, x86 or Arm.