SiFive, Inc., recognized as the gold standard in RISC-V computing, has unveiled its latest innovation, the SiFive Performance P870-D datacenter processor. This new processor is designed to meet the demanding needs of highly parallelizable infrastructure workloads such as video streaming, storage, and web appliances. By combining the P870-D with products from the SiFive Intelligence product family, datacenter architects can create a high-performance, energy-efficient compute subsystem tailored for AI-powered applications.
The P870-D builds on the success of its predecessor, the P870, and supports the open AMBA CHI protocol, offering customers increased flexibility to scale the number of clusters. This scalability allows for significant performance boosts while minimizing power consumption. By using a standard CHI bus, the P870-D enables customers to scale up to 256 cores, supporting industry-standard protocols like Compute Express Link (CXL) and CHI chip to chip (C2C). This facilitates the creation of coherent, high core count heterogeneous SoCs and chiplet configurations.
The processor’s design emphasizes improved compute density, offering superior performance per watt for workloads that require the execution of multiple compute tasks in parallel. This efficiency is crucial as the industry seeks to lower the cost of training AI models and aligns with the growing emphasis on sustainability.
SiFive’s comprehensive approach, including software, IOMMU, interrupt controller, and other uncore blocks, combined with their intelligence processors, allows customers to achieve optimal performance/watt/dollar metrics for AI and datacenter workloads. As stated by John Ronco, SiFive’s SVP of Product, “The new P870-D enhances our proven Performance architecture to bring new levels of performance, flexibility, and scalability.”
Additionally, SiFive has incorporated Reliability Availability Serviceability (RAS) features into the P870-D, which are designed to detect errors and protect data integrity, preventing downtime and ensuring system reliability. The processor also includes a distributed and scalable IOMMU for accelerating virtualized device IO, critical for addressing the latest functional safety and security requirements.
Key features of the P870-D include scalability to 256 cores, compatibility with the RVA23 profile, support for the RISC-V Sv57 extension, and an Advanced Interrupt Architecture compliant interrupt controller. Customers can leverage both open source and first-party software, benefiting from the collaborative efforts within the RISC-V community, such as the RISE Project.
The P870-D processor is currently sampling to lead customers, with a final production release expected by the end of 2024.