SiFive launches Performance P670/P470 to meet consumer demand for wearable devices
SiFive, a chip design company based on the open-source RISC-V architecture, announced the launch of the new SiFive Performance series processors P670 and P470. The two new products address the need for small size, high performance, and high efficiency in high-volume applications such as wearables, smart homes, industrial automation, AR/VR, and other consumer devices.
According to SiFive, the Performance P670 and P470 products offer a combination of computing density, energy efficiency, and a powerful feature set that is ideal for a variety of applications and markets, with key features including:
- Support for virtualization, including a separate IOMMU for accelerating virtualized device IO
- Full, Out-of-Order, RISC-V Vector implementation, based on the ratified RISC-V Vector v1.0 Specification
- First to market with the RISC-V Vector Cryptography extensions
- SiFive WorldGuard system security
- Full RISC-V RVA22 profile compliance
- New, Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) compliant interrupt controller, with better support for Message Signal Interrupts (MSI) and virtualization
- Enhanced scalability with fully coherent multi-core, multi-cluster, with support for up to 16 cores
The Performance P670 offers a wealth of features, including a maximum frequency of over 3.4GHz in 5nm; the performance is higher than 12 SpecINT2k6/GHz, which provides the best performance in the limited area and power range; provides higher single-threaded performance and twice the computational density compared to traditional solutions; includes a 2x 128-bit vector ALU, compliant with the RISC-V Vector v1.0 specification.
The Performance P470 is SiFive’s first efficiency-focused out-of-order, area-optimized vector processor. Expanding on the previous Performance P500 series, it has been optimized to deliver best-in-class performance efficiency and area density with four times the compute density of leading competitors. At the same time, it can be used as a supporting product of the Performance P670, suitable for demanding applications that need to share computing resources while optimizing power consumption. SiFive will also release an area-optimized version of the Performance P470, the P470, excluding vector elements.
SiFive’s Performance P600 series focuses on performance, and the P650, the predecessor of the Performance P670, is comparable in performance to the Arm Cortex-A77. The Performance P470 is designed as a companion chip to the Performance P670, and the two can be combined into an Arm-like big.LITTLE configuration in smartphones and tablets.
