SiFive Unveils the Excessive-Efficiency, AI-Accelerating HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Growth Board

RISC-V pioneer SiFive has introduced a brand new high-performance improvement board constructed round its P550 processor cores — which can launch, the corporate claims, because the trade’s first RISC-V board to characteristic out-of-order execution capabilities: the HiFive Premier P550.

“The recognition of our improvement boards underscores the expansion and maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem,” says Patrick Little, SiFive’s chief government officer and chair. “The HiFive board has at all times been the ‘golden reference’ RISC-V improvement platform. Constructing on this confirmed basis with the brand new HiFive Premier P550, builders can benefit from SiFive’s high-performance IP in a cost-efficient platform that will likely be accessible in quantity, opening up limitless potentialities for RISC-V innovation in AI [Artificial Intelligence] functions and past.”

The center of the brand new board is an Eswin EIC7700 system-on-chip with 4 SiFive Efficiency P550 processor cores, a proprietary implementation of the free and open-source 64-bit RV64GBC RISC-V structure. These, the corporate says, supply a 13-stage triple-issue pipeline with out-of-order execution help — the primary commercially-available RISC-V chip to supply such help, by SiFive’s measure. The chip additionally features a 2D/3D graphics processor and a neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor for on-device machine studying and synthetic intelligence workloads delivering a claimed 13.3 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute.

The HiFive Premier P550 is not a real single-board laptop, although: the system-on-chip and extra {hardware}, together with a alternative of 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5 reminiscence and 128GB of eMMC storage, is discovered on a system-on-module, which then sits in a provider board breaking out the half’s numerous options. This board brings out twin gigabit Ethernet ports plus a devoted debug Ethernet interface, 5 USB 3.2 Gen. 1 ports, a PCI Specific Gen. 3 16x slot, M.2 E-key slot for an elective radio module, and a SATA 3 connector for extra storage — all in a mini-DTX type issue suitable with current instances and energy provides.

On the software program aspect, SiFive is continuous its partnership with Canonical to supply Ubuntu Linux help. “RISC-V is giving builders a brand new stage of freedom to innovate, and SiFive is likely one of the prime firms main the cost. The provision of HiFive Premier P550 is a major milestone for the RISC-V improvement neighborhood,” claims Canonical’s Gordan Markuš. “Because of our collaboration with SiFive, builders utilizing the HiFive Premier P550 board will have the ability to innovate at velocity with Ubuntu. Moreover, Canonical’s software program and providers will speed up time to market, and guarantee long-term help and safety upkeep for our enterprise companions.”

Whereas SiFive is positioning the HiFive Premier P550 as the primary commercially-available RISC-V improvement board to characteristic out-of-order execution, although, the catch is that it isn’t truly commercially accessible fairly but: the HiFive Premier P550 is predicted to launch in July this yr, at an as-yet unconfirmed worth level.

The announcement of the HiFive Premier P550 could come as a shock, too, to those that had been watching eagerly for information on the launch of the HiFive Professional P550, a really comparable board additionally primarily based across the P550 cores however developed in partnership with Intel and primarily based on the corporate’s Horse Creek chip. With SiFive’s web site now redirecting the HiFive Professional P550 touchdown web page to the Premier P550, it could seem the Professional has been cancelled — although neither SiFive nor Intel have made any bulletins on the subject.

Extra info is obtainable on the SiFive web site, although on the time of writing the corporate had not but revealed a datasheet nor full technical specs.