As a part of SiFive’s bulletins as we speak, together with enabling SiFive IP on Intel’s Foundry Service choices, Intel shall be creating its personal RISC-V growth platform utilizing its 7nm course of know-how. This platform, known as Horse Creek, will function a number of of SiFive’s new Performance P550 cores additionally being introduced as we speak, and shall be paired with Intel’s DDR and PCIe IP know-how.
On first studying into the press launch, it isn’t 100% clear that Intel’s commentary discusses a platform with P550 as a bunch or as an add-in gadget: to cite Intel, ‘We are happy to be a lead growth companion with SiFive to showcase to mutual clients the spectacular efficiency of their P550 on our 7nm Horse Creek platform’. Intel traditionally sometimes retains its Creek household names, corresponding to Boulder Creek, Cherry Creek, or Timber Creek, for socketed platforms – not for all-in-one embedded growth platforms. Not solely that, the wording makes it sound like we should always contemplate a RISC-V core as an assistant core managing one other a part of a system.
However it could seem that Intel intends to make this a fully-featured growth system, alongside comparable strains to SiFive’s personal HiFive Unmatched platform launched early this 12 months. What makes this particular is that Intel is committing to creating the SoC by itself 7nm course of node, which gives a ‘simpler’ car for Intel to check and ramp up its 7nm know-how. This will be coupled with rising curiosity in RISC-V growth, and deploying a platform although Intel’s provide chain and distribution might need a far attain to place these within the fingers of upcoming builders.
The new SiFive Performance P550 core on the coronary heart of Horse Creek is SiFive’s highest efficiency processor to this point, with the corporate quoting a SPEC2006int of 8.65 per GHz. It is a Linux-capable core, with full assist for the RISC-V vector extension v1.0rc. It has a 13-stage triple-issue out-of-order microarchitecture with a personal 32KB+32KB L1 cache and a personal L2 cache (per core) The design helps 4 cores in a single cluster that may be paired as much as four MB of shared L3.
The time scale for this platform coming to market is sort of attention-grabbing. Despite Intel just lately dedicated to bringing its 7nm to market in 2023 with the compute tile for its Meteor Lake processor as its first 7nm product, we’re being advised that Horse Creek silicon shall be prepared in 2022, which might make Horse Creek its first 7nm product. For what it’s value, it’s unlikely that the Intel RISC-V answer is tile-based, however it could be simple sufficient to carry a small RISC-V chip growth platform to market round then. The chip is more likely to be small, so that may work in favor of its prices as effectively. A query does stay as as to whether Intel’s involvement right here is only within the {hardware}, or whether or not there shall be an Intel-based software program stack to go together with it.
