We recently attended an analyst briefing with SiFive. We wrote about SiFive last year, and were fairly cautious about the challenges they face. With the benefit of.
Why it matters: RISC V pioneer SiFive has gone through several iterations, but has now solidified a business model that essentially positions it as a direct competitor to Arm. If they can continue to execute they will benefit from much of the very healthy RISC V momentum.
We recently attended an analyst briefing with SiFive. We wrote about SiFive last year, and were fairly cautious about the challenges they face. With the benefit of time and a deeper dive into their plans, we came away from this latest meeting much more interested in the company than we had been.
SiFive is one of the leading companies providing RISC V solutions. RISC V is an “open” alternative to the Arm or x86 instruction set architectures (ISA), which power the math inside of processors. We have already touched on the subject of RISC V, it is technically interesting and has arrived at a good time with considerable interest from the market.
SiFive is often described as the “Red Hat” of RISC V, the leading company in commercializing an open source codebase. But this is a flawed description. Instead, we should start to think of SiFive as essentially a direct competitor of Arm, a licensor of ISA intellectual property. They sell “blueprints” that other companies pay to copy into their own chip designs. This seems a bit counter-intuitive since RISC V is “free” and “open.”
Editor’s Note:
Guest author Jonathan Goldberg is the founder of D2D Advisory, a multi-functional consulting firm.
