SiFive
More info
- Creator
- Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee, Andrew Waterman
- Released
- 2015
- Type
- Processor IP
The company RISC-V's creators started to prove you can sell cores for an open instruction set — rather like ARM, minus the licence fee for the architecture itself.
SiFive was founded in 2015 by Krste Asanović, Yunsup Lee and Andrew Waterman, who had designed RISC-V at UC Berkeley. The instruction set is free, but someone still has to design, verify and stand behind finished processor cores. The first commercial RISC-V chip, the FE310 on the HiFive1 dev board, shipped in 2016; the HiFive Unleashed of 2018 was the first board that could run Linux.
The business model resembles ARM's: SiFive licenses core designs that others build into their own chips, from tiny microcontroller cores to performance cores for data centres and AI. In 2021 Intel was reported to have offered around $2 billion for the company, but no deal materialised.