Talking About the SiFive Performance P650 RISC-V Core

Dec. 7, 2021

SiFive CEO Patrick Little discusses the differentiating factors of its new Performance P650 RISC-V core with Editor Bill Wong, as well as its intended applications.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

SiFive is a major player in the RISC-V arena, providing RISC-V core designs. The company's latest addition is the Performance P650 that competes with high-end Arm Cortex-A platforms (see figure). I spoke with Patrick Little, CEO and President of SiFive, about the P650, why it's different, and where it's targeted.

The 64-bit P650 RISC-V core can be combined in clusters with up to 16 cores. It supports hypervisors and virtualization, and incorporates advanced security and cryptographic features.

The Performance 650 is a 64-bit RISC-V core with a 13-stage out-of-order (OOO) pipeline and 4-wide issue architecture with three execution units.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.