RISC-V House SiFive is Coming for Arm’s Crown
upstart writes:
RISC-V house SiFive is coming for Arm's crown:
SiFive has announced plans to utilize a new cash injection to challenge the dominance of Arm with its RISC-V CPU cores.
The company has sealed an additional $175 million in funding in a recent investment round, which will combine with the takings from the sale of its connectivity business, OpenFive, to create a $350 nest egg.
According to Patrick Little, SiFive CEO, the firm will use the funds to accelerate the development of new RISC-V based cores capable of besting Arm across performance and efficiency metrics.
In today's market, Arm-based processors are ubiquitous. The company dominates the mobile computing landscape, and the success of Apple's M1 series shows Arm has a promising future inside laptops and desktops too. Arm designs also feature in chips for TVs, smart cars, drones, various IoT devices and some data center servers.
RISC-V is a free, open source instruction set architecture (ISA) built around the same design principles as Arm's proprietary designs, which command royalties each time they are integrated into an SoC. Although RISC-V-based processors are currently far less common, data from Deloitte suggests the number of RISC-V cores in circulation will double in each of the next two years.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.