SiFive, Inc. has announced the introduction of the SiFive Performance P870-D data center processor, which is designed to address the market's pressing need to efficiently handle highly parallel infrastructure workloads such as video streaming, storage, and web devices.
Based on the P870 series, the P870-D innovatively supports the open AMBA CHI protocol, giving customers a high degree of freedom in cluster expansion. This feature not only improves system performance, but also greatly optimizes power management, allowing users to easily scale up to 256 cores while building efficient, heterogeneous SoC and chipset configurations based on industry-standard protocols such as Compute Express Link (CXL) and CHI chip-to-chip (C2C).
The P870-D stands out in a highly competitive market with its superior compute density and performance-per-watt metrics, providing powerful support for workloads that require multiple compute tasks to be processed in parallel. In addition, the high performance of the P870-D coincides with the industry's strong focus on sustainability, demonstrating the future trend of green computing.
John Ronco, Senior Vice President of Products at SiFive, said, "With its broad portfolio of RISC-V solutions, SiFive brings a clean and modern life to the AI era. The P870-D not only strengthens our renowned performance architecture, but also sets a new benchmark in performance, flexibility, and scalability. Combined with our intelligent processors designed for dedicated AI computing and complete software and hardware solutions, our customers can easily achieve the optimal performance/power/cost ratio for AI and data center workloads.”
Edward Wilford, senior research director at Omdia, predicts: "Going forward, energy efficiency will be at the heart of data center architects' decisions. With its significant energy efficiency advantages, the RISC-V architecture is expected to continue to expand in the field of high-performance data centers and occupy an important position in the market. By 2030, we expect more energy-efficient data center processors to account for more than 40% of the market share, driven by open source software and open standards architectures.”
SiFive is working with a wide range of ecosystem partners to simplify the development of complex systems. Arteris was a key partner in providing SiFive with simulation-ready reference design that included the X280 and P870-D processors. By integrating SiFive's RISC-V processors with Arteris' advanced network-on-chip (NoC) IP, customers can accelerate time-to-market and reduce development risk.
Figure: SiFive unveils new data center processors
"Our network-on-chip IP dramatically simplifies the design process for complex, multi-core, heterogeneous SoCs, ensuring low latency and high bandwidth for AI workloads," said Michal Siwinski, Chief Marketing Officer at Arteris. "We are excited to continue our collaboration with SiFive to provide the ecosystem with high-performance, low-power RISC-V system solutions that enable customers to complete projects on time and on budget."
In addition, the P870-D incorporates comprehensive Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) functions and distributed and scalable IOMMU to provide a solid guarantee for the IO acceleration of virtualized devices and meet the latest functional safety and assurance requirements.
Key highlights of the P870-D include:
Supports flexible expansion of up to 256 cores to meet on-demand computing needs.
Fully compatible with RVA23 profiles, accelerating system development and deployment, reducing project risks and costs.
It supports RISC-V Sv57 expansion and provides 57-bit virtual address space.
Equipped with 4 CHI ports/cluster and wider peripheral and storage port links.
Integrated Advanced Interrupt Architecture (AIA) interrupt controller with support for Message Signal Interrupt (MSI) and virtualization.
From a software perspective, SiFive encourages data center platform developers to take advantage of the synergies between open source software and first-party software. Thanks to the continuous contributions of the RISC-V community, such as the RISE project, the basic open source software elements are becoming more and more abundant, accelerating the design and implementation of the P870-D. At the same time, SiFive's standard runtime control commissioning capabilities and commissioning solutions supported by leading tool vendors will further accelerate the development process.
To secure the P870-D design, SiFive introduces an open WorldGuard model that simplifies the deployment of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Currently, samples of the P870-D processor are available to major customers, and the final production version is expected to be officially released by the end of 2024.
