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> couldn't make sense of their product strategy. But maybe that's a me problem Well, you drove a Bambino on a 60 miles each way commute over a huge hill, so th

> couldn't make sense of their product strategy. But maybe that's a me problem Well, you drove a Bambino on a 60 miles each way commute over a huge hill, so there's something questionable going on there :p I can't see much wrong with the "start with microcontrollers, work your way up to single-issue Linux-capable, then dual-issue in-order, then small then bigger and bigger OoO" strategy. What else can you do? Try to take on Xeon day #1? On the other hand, sure, you can ask a lot of questions about how you take that to the market, and who the customers will be. SiFive early on obviously thought there were a lot of people out there who really wanted to make little custom chips for this and that but didn't have the skills, and SiFive (via buying OpenSilicon) could provide a one stop shop. And even provide a lot of automation around that, in the SiFive Chip Designer -- there used to be a web page (similar to SiFive Core Designer) but it's long gone, but see e.g. this Yunsup's presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxd93jb1OAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxd93jb1OAk It seems no one really wanted to do that -- or at least SiFive didn't find them. So they got rid of OpenSilicon again (at a HUGE profit) and seem to be just selling CPU core IP to people who were already making chips, had all the people and knowledge to do that, but just wanted to change away from Arm or Tensilica or 8051 or whatever. > what they're doing with 175m in Series F funding. Where do you go from there? That's still absolute chickenfeed compared to what Intel or AMD or probably Arm spend on designing a single core.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago
Hey Bruce! I'm talking more about how they thought they were going to interact with customers w/ a design language no one seemed to want to use. I think we agree on that; NO ONE seemed to be asking for Rocket / Scala / Chisel / Firrtl and it seemed odd that every time a potential customer asked for Verilog, they kept pushing Chisel. But now that they're not pushing the core designer, how are they justifying their multiple? They're no longer a SaaS play, they're an IP design play which makes it a lot more difficult to hit the rule of 40. But Intel famously passed on the $2B offer, which means they have to do something to convince someone out there they ARE worth whatever their post-money, round F valuation is lest the round C investors lose money and the round A investors not make as much money as they had hoped. And yes $175m is less than ARM spends to design a core, but that's not what the $175m round F was for. Or at least I hope it's not what it's for, 'cause if they did sink it into designing a core that's just now on par with ARM's a72 (or was the recent goodness supposed to be on par with the a77?) from 4 years ago, what's the motivation for using a RISC-V core instead of an ARM core? "We're as good as ARM was 4 years ago" isn't a great marketing slogan. Your information about the details of the OpenSilicon spin-off must be better than mine. "Huge" profit is not what I heard. But neither of us were in San Mateo when that happened. I would LOVE to be able to buy a part that lets me test any of the recent cores (I mean for less than $100,000.) Or I would love to hear about any customers using the new cores. It shouldn't be that hard to find a reference customer.

OhMeadhbh 3y ago

Hey Bruce! I'm talking more about how they thought they were going to interact with customers w/ a design language no one seemed to want to use. I think we agree on that; NO ONE seemed to be asking for Rocket / Scala / Chisel / Firrtl and it seemed odd that every time a potential customer asked for Verilog, they kept pushing Chisel. But now that they're not pushing the core designer, how are they justifying their multiple? They're no longer a SaaS play, they're an IP design play which makes it a lot more difficult to hit the rule of 40. But Intel famously passed on the $2B offer, which means they have to do something to convince someone out there they ARE worth whatever their post-money, round F valuation is lest the round C investors lose money and the round A investors not make as much money as they had hoped. And yes $175m is less than ARM spends to design a core, but that's not what the $175m round F was for. Or at least I hope it's not what it's for, 'cause if they did sink it into designing a core that's just now on par with ARM's a72 (or was the recent goodness supposed to be on par with the a77?) from 4 years ago, what's the motivation for using a RISC-V core instead of an ARM core? "We're as good as ARM was 4 years ago" isn't a great marketing slogan. Your information about the details of the OpenSilicon spin-off must be better than mine. "Huge" profit is not what I heard. But neither of us were in San Mateo when that happened. I would LOVE to be able to buy a part that lets me test any of the recent cores (I mean for less than $100,000.) Or I would love to hear about any customers using the new cores. It shouldn't be that hard to find a reference customer.