SiFive shares views on Chinese market and the era of vertical semiconductor
The open-standard instruction set architecture (ISA) RISC-V has been integral to China's IC design development as it pursues greater autonomy. The currently ongoing RISC-V Summit China 2023, taking place in Beijing between August 23 - 25, has brought together leading fabless players in the...
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RISC-V up in the space
In this context, Kang mentioned SiFive's X280 vector core optimized for edge inference. The multi-core capable processor is designated for applications requiring high-throughput, single-thread performance while under significant power constraints. In 2022, notably, X280 was adopted for NASA's next-generation High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) processor to be used in every future space mission, especially as the computing power boost it brought will bring advanced functions like autonomous capabilities and vision processing into space. Compared to today's space computers, the X280 has demonstrated a 100x increase in compute capabilities.
"If you look at the space, it's an example of a vertical business, as it has very unique requirements," Kang observed, pointing out that NASA is seeking to move faster by adopting more commercial solutions. In fact, NASA's selection of SiFive pointed to the long-term growth potential of the RISC-V ecosystem. As Kang explained, the long duration requirements of space products mean that space industry players like NASA have to identify the best ecosystem in the long term, including the amount of support available in the future. Though the SiFive vice president acknowledged that RISC-V is still young today and enjoys lesser ecosystem support compared to rivaling architectures like X86 and ARM, it is rapidly catching up.
"What will be the best ecosystem 10 years from now? Which ecosystem will I find the most programmers working on? And then that answer becomes very clear, it's going to be RISC-V," Kang emphasized.
