SiFive has just appointed a former Qualcomm executive, Patrick Little, as the new CEO. The senior official has been hired to help establish the company’s RISC-V based processors as an alternative to Arm, which is being acquired by Nvidia for a 40 billion US Dollars deal.
For those unaware, SiFive is a chip designer that makes processors that can be customized for any purpose the customer requires it for. This has it make chips to meet low end to even some high end computing requirements. The processors used by the company are based on RISC-V, which is a free and open architecture that has been growing in popularity since its creation a decade ago.
The people behind the architecture were inspired by the philosophy of “hardware freedom” to offer alternatives to royalty-based processors that are licensed for a fee by a single company. According to an VentureBeat interview with Patrick Little, the senior executive said that “It’s just very clear that the world is moving away from generic processors to workload-focused and optimized solutions,” and that, “The industry is transforming away from general-purpose computing to something domain-focused. With the news this week, it’s now accelerating, and the magnitude has really picked up. Now there are many companies saying it’s time to look at open versus closed solutions.”
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Notably, despite Nvidia acquiring Arm, the former has pledged to still continue to offer the latter’s open licensing strategy. Although, the free and open nature of RISC-V is already a great deal for many. But the challenge still remains of growing its ecosystem of software, tools, and testing to make it a viable alternative to Arm. At the moment, the ARM architecture is found on about 95 percent of the smartphone market, with the industry shipping more than 22 billion chips a year.
Furthermore, SiFive is also planning on unveiling its first RISC-V based PC in October 2020, alongside new RISC-V chips. While this architecture isn’t as matured as others like the x86 and ARM, it has made great progress in recent years. SiFive will be targetting developers and professionals with this PC and not the commercial market. The ide ais to offer RISC-V based systems so that developers can make code software that was meant for RISC-V powered devices. The company plans to introduce new processors as well, which will be optimized for “high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and computer vision applications.”
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