SiFiveは、RISC-Vの開発者らによって設立された企業だ。現在、300以上のデザインウィンを獲得し、100社以上の顧客を持つ。2022年3月にはシリーズFラウンドで1億7500万米ドルを調達
news.yahoo.co.jp
Posted on yahoo 3 days ago, so hopefully it’s not old news
SiFive, a RISC-V processor core IP (Intellectual Property), is preparing to establish a Japanese corporation. It is expected that the establishment will be completed within the next week or two at the earliest. The president of SiFive Japan was Mr. Sam Rogan, who was the president of Xilinx (acquired by AMD) and CEO of Xilinx Japan. He is currently the Vice President of Japan and South Korea at SiFive.
RISC-V Core Growth Forecast [Click to Expand] Source: SiFive
In Japan, "RISC-V Day Tokyo" has been held since 2017. Why did you establish a Japanese corporation now? Jack Kang, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Customer Experience and Corporate Marketing at SiFive, at a press conference held in Tokyo on July 28, 2022, “We’ve been working with RIS We’ve been involved with Japanese customers in various ways, including C-V Day Tokyo, but we believe that the establishment of a Japanese corporation is the best time,” he said. Japanese customers are somewhat conservative, and I think some of them were looking at the importance of RISC-V and market trends. But now it's exactly the watershed of RISC-V, and the Japanese market is in a state of "prepared" for the adoption of RISC-V."
Rogan emphasises, “Although we are still visiting manufacturers in various industries from automotive to communications, RISC-V is very “receive”.”
At SiFive Japan, we will start selling and supporting RISC-V. Rogan said, “In the future, we are considering development as well. Japan is required to have very high quality, so we are also considering setting up a quality control department." In Japan, DTS Insight provides SiFive's IP, development boards, and services as the sole agent, but Rogan said that the agency agreement with DTS Insight will continue after the establishment of SiFive Japan.
SiFive is a company founded by developers of RISC-V. Currently, we have more than 300 design wins and have more than 100 customers. In March 2022, we raised US$175 million in Series F rounds, resulting in corporate value exceeding US$2.5 billion.
Although RISC-V is an open source ISA (instruction set architecture), it is also a great advantage to be able to cover various applications with a single ISA. Kang said: "Arm has released 17 ISAs over the last 16 years. RISC-V is a single ISA that can accommodate applications from small to large scale," he emphasises.
Currently, the processor family provided by SiFive is a 32-bit and 64-bit CPU core "Essential" for embedded applications, high-performance 64 for networking and infrastructure and enterprise Bit CPU core "Performance" and AI core "Intelligence" for training/inference in Edge AI (artificial intelligence) and cloud. There are 11, 4 and 2 product groups each. This is joined by the "Automotive" family, which is scheduled to be announced soon. Kang explains, “Compared to the same level of Armour core, the RISC-V core is 30-40% more power efficient,” Kang explains.
The growing RISC-V market
The RISC-V market is currently growing rapidly. Mr. Rogan says, "It's a high level of attention, especially in China and Korea." Furthermore, in China and India, we are supporting the introduction of RISC-V at the national level. The movement in China became the driving force for the formation of the RISC-V ecosystem" (Kang)
Semico Research predicts that a total of 62.4 billion RISC-V cores will be shipped by 2025. Shipments of SOCs (System on Chip) with RISC-V are expected to increase from 2020 to 2027, with an annual average annual growth rate of 73.6%. Kang said, "As we have already shipped 10 billion cores in the first half of 2022, it will probably be faster than 2025 to reach 62.4 billion."
The attention to RISC-V has increased with the announcement of the acquisition of ARM by NVIDIA. The acquisition was a breakthrough, but debates about the neutrality of CPU core vendors became vigourous, and many manufacturers began to look for “arm core alternatives.” Kang commented on this as "I think the sense of crisis has become apparent in the industry regarding the neutrality of CPU cores and ISA."
I wonder if Intel was also one of the manufacturers who felt such a sense of crisis. The company announced in February 2022 that it would join RISC-V International as a Premier (Premier) member. In addition, the development platform (development code: Horse Creek), which applies the "Intel 4" process, adopts the processor core "P550" which is the performance family of SiFive. Horse Creek is also scheduled to be released in late 2022.
Rogan emphasised that "SiFive has a chance." By establishing a Japanese corporation, we will contribute more strongly to Japanese customers."