SiFive to showcase RISC-V based PC in October 

SiFive will unveil a PC based on its RISC-V core at the Linley Fall Processor Conference 2020 on October 27, the company said.

SiFive was founded by UC Berkeley professors Krste Asanovic, Andrew Waterman and Yunsup Lee in 2015.

The three unveiled RISC-V, an open source CPU instruction set architecture to challenge Arm’s core in 2010.

SiFive has said RISC-V have better power efficiency, flexibility and price-competitiveness compared to Arm’s.

RISC-V cores are being used mostly in memory storage and IoT devices.

SiFive will likely argue with its latest unveiling at the conference that the architecture is viable in high performance computing devices as well. 

The PC that will be unveiled at the show will use SiFive’s latest FU740 SoC. The SoC has a heterogeneous mix-match core and is scalable to PCs. Developers can develop bare metal and Linux-based RISC-V application. 

RISC-V has recently been applied to the field programmable gate array (FPGA) sector. FPGA are more pricier than conventional semiconductors and used in airlines, automobiles, defense and telecommunication industries. FPGA with RSIC-V cores rather than Arm’s will likely be cheaper. In December, Microchip Technology launched the RISC-V-based PolarFire SoC FPGA. Starting this month, the company has begun supply of RISC-V-based FPGA development boards.

Chris Lattner, president of product and engineering at SiFive, said the company plans to provide a new RISC-V processor core for high-performance computing, AI and computer vision applications in the future.

People familiar with the matter said Nvidia’s Arm acquisition could give SiFive some opportunities as smaller fabless companies find Arm’s IP license fees expensive and difficult to change after use.