At the RISC-V Summit in California today, chip designer SiFive revealed its new Performance P650 processor. According to SiFive its latest offering is 50% more powerful than the Performance P550, which was just launched in June.
The 64-bit Performance P650 utilizes the same “thirteen-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline” as the P550. Instruction-issue width has been increased on the P650, which SiFive has increased performance per clock cycle by 40%.
Maximum clock speed has also been increased, and we learned last month that the Performance P650 peaks at 3.5GHz. SiFive believes the P650 “will enable RISC-V designs for performance-sensitive application processor markets from data center to edge, automotive, mobile and more.”
The Performance P650 can be scaled up to 16 cores. For high-performance applications, SiFive says that multiple chips can be configured to deliver 128-core clusters. It all adds up to a chip that “compares favorably to the Arm Cortex-A77 across a variety of workloads.”
SiFive plans to kick off a preview of the Performance P650 in the first quarter of 2022. “Select lead customers,” will be invited to participate and general availability is slated for the middle of next year.
RISC-V is getting close. If they could get the performance up to Snapdragon 865 levels in a year or so and get the prices down then I think they could be solid competition to ARM. The biggest issue will be compatibility, much more Linux development will be required before the general public could use these processors.