Seems someone’s looking for an Arm wrestle
SiFive, having designed RISC-V CPU cores for various AI chips, is now offering to license the blueprints for its own homegrown full-blown machine-learning accelerator.
Announced this week, SiFive’s Intelligence XM series clusters promise a scalable building block for developing AI chips large and small. The idea is that others can license the RISC-V-based designs to integrate into processors and system-on-chips – to be placed in products from edge and IoT gear to datacenter servers – and hopefully foster more competition between architectures.
Fabless SiFive is no stranger to the AI arena. As we’ve previously reported, at least some of Google’s tensor processing units are already using SiFive’s X280 RISC-V CPU cores to manage the machine-learning accelerators and keep their matrix multiplication units (MXUs) fed with work and data.
Likewise, John Ronco, SVP and GM of SiFive UK, told The Register that SiFive’s RISC-V designs also underpin the CPU cores found in Tenstorrent’s newly disclosed Blackhole accelerator, which we looked at in detail at Hot Chips last month.
And in a canned statement, SiFive CEO Patrick Little claimed the US-based outfit is now supplying RISC-V-based chip designs to five of the « Magnificent 7 » companies – Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla – though we suspect not all that silicon necessarily involves AI.
What sets SiFive’s Intelligence XM-series apart from previous engagements with the likes of Google or Tenstorrent is that rather than having its CPU cores attached to a third-party matrix math engine, all packaged up in the same chip, SiFive is instead bringing out its own complete AI accelerator design for customers to license and put into silicon. This isn’t aimed at semiconductor players capable of crafting their own accelerators, such as Google and Tenstorrent – it’s aimed at organizations that want to take an off-the-shelf design, customize it, and send it to the fab.
