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The risk of RISC-V: What's going on at SiFive?
- the-dude 3y agoThrough multiple sources, SiFive has instigated a large number of layoffs. Numbers vary, from 100 to 300+, but multiple sources confirm that most of the engineering team, especially the physical design engineers, sales, and product team.
- ilaksh 3y agoDoes this include any core engineers? If so, where are those people going now? It could end up having a silver lining if RISC-V talent/knowledge becomes less monopolized.
- KirillPanov 3y ago> multiple sources confirm that most of the engineering team, especially the physical design engineers The answer to your question: yes.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoI have had my eye on Tenstorrent as a company, they look very clever. Here's hoping some of the better talent goes over to places like that.
- osti 3y agoHow are they clever? Their core product AI chips seem OK, but why the sudden bet on RISC-V. And Jim Keller even puts out some ridiculous statements about RISC-V taking over the data center in 5 to 10 years. To me they seem to be losing focus, or maybe it's that their core products won't be as good as expected so they had to come out with all kinda hype driven stuff to pull in more investments.
- snvzz 3y ago>but why the sudden bet on RISC-V. Because they believe in it. >And Jim Keller even puts out some ridiculous statements about RISC-V taking over the data center in 5 to 10 years. Not at all ridiculous. RISC-V is inevitable. Tenstorrent already has a design, Ascalon, which is strong enough to be competitive with what's expected from Zen5. And they've already licensed it to LG.
- osti 3y agoPerformance is competitive if we believe their marketing talk comparing unreleased CPU products. Saying it's inevitable, I'd like to have whatever crysty ball you got there.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adastra22 3y agoA shame, but also unsurprising. I never understood how they could have such a high burn rate for a technology that hadn't really taken off in the markets that they were targeting. RISC-V is/was vitally important in putting downward pressure on ARM licensing. But large companies were never going to move off ARM for their workhorse CPUs. They'd use the threat of moving to RISC-V as a way of getting sweetheart IP deals from ARM, but no one actually wanted to start over on a new software transition while the move to ARM was still unfinished.
- edrxty 3y agoYou're not wrong. I think the move to riscv will happen but not in any time span we can make predictions inside of (~10 years+). ARM has been awful to license stuff from and riscv has been great for keeping them from going absolutely mad with power.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoit's already happening. Nvidia and Western digital are already shipping riscv in production. high performance riscv is likely closer to a decade away, but it's already doing a pretty good job of replacing the embedded zoo
- adastra22 3y agoBut why would NVIDIA ever ship a RISC-V vector unit? They have no incentive to.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago> RISC-V is/was vitally important in putting downward pressure on ARM licensing. Given current laws. I wonder if the world wouldn’t be better off with strong interoperability laws, where ISAs are simply neither copyrightable nor patentable. This would instantly kill ARM of course, but their ISA (well, ISAs) would live on. I love the design of RISC-V, but I find it kind of sick that being forbidden to implement one’s own ARM or x86 core is such a big reason for its success.
- contrarian1234 3y agoNot an industry expert.. just a curious onlooker, but this is not surprising in the slightest - though I am surprised the VC firehose has been turned off this soon. I thought they'd float along on stupid money for longer. From the start they seemed overfunded and with no real good long term business model. They have no lock-in because of the whole open nature of RISC-V. - They're not designing for any specific in-house purpose like Alibaba/Western-Digital - The low end will always be dominated by Allwinner and company and they can't win - The high end is competing with x64 and huge companies like Intel.. also can't win unless you're Apple They make non-pricecompetitive middle of the road chips that nobody really needs other than RISC-V enthusiasts.. And at the end of the day effectively anyone can come in and do what they're doing at any point. The latest announcement seems to show they're finally shifting to the strategy their Chinese competitors have been doing for years. Open RISC-V cores and then get lock-in with custom NPUs. I doubt they'll be able to compete with Chinese firms there though Cool idealistic company, but at the end of the day making cool stuff isn't in itself a business model - and you gotta make money to pay the bills RIP
- edrxty 3y agoI mentioned it elsewhere but a big draw is FPGA soft cores or others forms of embedded CPU stuff. ARM licensing terms are bonkers so riscv has a major advantage if you need something better than a NIOS II or Microblaze (soft cores that Intel and Xilinx provide respectively).
- galangalalgol 3y agowith so mych of xilinx' lineup having hard arm cores built in, what is the driver for soft cores?
- edrxty 3y agoWorked on a project using them a couple years ago and it was a complete shit show. Stuff like atrocious documentation, spaghetti code demo projects and very difficult to reach support. We surmised that their auto core builder thing was actually probably a few people manually configuring and firing off build jobs rather than any truly automated/turnkey process. They also lacked a lot of peripherals/interfaces that you'd expect or, more accurately, need for any product leveraging the performance the cores could theoretically provide. Long story short, this isn't super surprising given that it basically killed our product.
- contrarian1234 3y agoCan you say more why you chose them for your product? I can't think of any conceivable reason you'd choose them over other options.. unless being open-everything is a core part of your brand/mission (which is completely fair, but pretty niche)
- edrxty 3y agoFPGA soft cores for space applications. You can't (or at least couldn't at the time) license ARM cores for FPGA deployments outside of R&D because ARM is psychotic.
- gchadwick 3y agoWe've had people consider Ibex for space applications, well verified and has a dual-core lockstep option: https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex https://github.com/lowRISC/ibex. An ETH Zurich team have done a triple core lockstep version for cubesats: https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/05/riscv_microcontroller_space/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/05/riscv_microcontroller...
- edrxty 3y agohttps://www.gaisler.com/index.php/information/servicessupport/asicfpga-design https://www.gaisler.com/index.php/information/servicessuppor... Gaisler is also current one of the biggest players there IIRC. I've used them for stuff in the past.
- meltedcapacitor 3y agoAwesome news. The world is healing. Having a big player as the "ARM of Risc-V" funded by VC was so toxic. It takes the oxygen out of the ecosystem. The next step in open hardware is not having more proprietary silicon shops, it's streamlining the manufacturing process to make it look more like pooled PCB manufacturing, so that open collaborative groups can cheaply iterate their designs.
- benj111 3y agoI disagree. Manufacturing processors is expensive. You need a big successful company to show that it's possible and profitable to invest. Long term, yes I kind of agree, you run the risk of extend and extinguish if you get one dominant player, but you aren't going to get to the point of RISC V being successful by shunning big companies willing to invest. You just need to make sure they're more red hat or sun (pre buyout).
- phkahler 3y agoManufacturing processors is expensive. Not really. I'd say designing processors is expensive in engineering costs, and open designs are already pretty impressive and can be used as starting points. It's also expensive to optimize a design for a given process, which is necessary to get the best performance (probably by a factor of two?) from the design/process. So I'd expect the foundries to start offering optimized RISC-V cores to SoC designers as part of their offerings - especially as we reach the end of scaling.
- benj111 3y agoOk, the designing, and tooling, testing etc. But that just makes it worse. If you have to spend £5million over 5 years to design something, you need to get funding until the point where you're actually selling products. If all the cost is in the actual manufacturing, you don't need the capital outlay early on.
- lizknope 3y agoIt takes $30 million for masks in 5nm. EDA tools for physical design are over $1 million per instance and you may need 20 to 200 licenses for a big chip. Total compensation for engineers is in the $150K to $400K range in the US. This isn't getting cheaper. PCB manufacturing is many orders of magnitude simpler and cheaper and easy to do at the hobbyist level.
- KirillPanov 3y agoCould we have a more useful title please? The article contains the text "SiFive has instigated a large number of layoffs." I suggest that as a vastly more useful title than "gosh golly something happened".
- taspeotis 3y agoAnd maybe the article could get to the fucking point?
- camel-cdr 3y agoI saw a recording of some sort of career advice online meeting for laid-off SiFive employees on YouTube about a week ago. I managed to find it in my cache, but it has been set to private, which is good, because the description contained a link to a spreedcheet of 37 employees and their contacts + job descriptions.
- gumby 3y agoIf you were one of those 37 you’d probably want that info to be public to help find another job.
- DarkmSparks 3y agoARM get a fairly easy ride because of all their phat juicy UK and US government contracts to build/design the systems that decrypt everyones communications. TBH I'm amazed how well SiFive have done to get this far. Just hope it doesnt mean that China takes over Risk V development, but I think it does.
- sam_goody 3y ago> China takes over *Risk* V development. There indeed is a RISC of China leading in development.
- gchadwick 3y agoThis may add a bit of colour to a technical debate going on right now in the RISCV Profiles working group. Qualcomm have proposed dropping the C (16-bit compressed instructions) extension from the RV23A profile (effectively the set of things to support if you want a 'standard' high performance RISC-V core). They have two main reasons 1. The variable length instructions (currently 16 bit or 32 bit but 48 bit on the horizon) complicate instruction fetch and decode and in particular this is a problem for high performance RISC-V implementations. 2. The C extension uses 75% of the 32-bit opcode space, this can be put to better use. They're saying the benefits from the C extension don't outweigh the costs. They're also saying that if you move forward with the C extension in RVA23 now there's no real backing out of it. As the software ecosystem develops removing it once it's baked in just won't be possible. However adding it back in later is more feasible. SiFive strongly disagree. They believe the C extension is worth the cost and that it doesn't prevent you from building high-performance cores. They also say that there's lots of implementations with C in already, so backing out of it now disadvantages those implementations. It could end up in being the first major fragmentation in the eco-system Qualcomm go one way and SiFive the other (other companies also sit on one side or the other of this debate but Qualcomm and SiFive are driving it). Indeed the latest proposal from Krste is to do just that with a new 'RVH23' profile.. I wonder how much this development has been driving SiFive's thinking here? Clearly they are under pressure to deliver to their investors so you can see why they want to keep things as they are rather than consider a big change. Good for SiFive, but good for the long-term RISC-V ecosystem? Edit: If you want the details check out the publicly readable tech-profiles list: https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/messages https://lists.riscv.org/g/tech-profiles/messages they've got recordings of the last two meetings that discussed the issue and presentations, all available via that message archive.
- klelatti 3y agoJust to add that Qualcomm have also proposed a new extension that will help keep code size down without using the C extension. It includes new load/store addressing modes, pre-post increment load/stores and load/store pairs amongst others. It would seem to take RISC-V closer to AArch64 in approach?
- 3y ago
- baq 3y agoIs there anyone to pick up the pieces? Apple: obviously not. but then, ARM charges an arm and a leg and they have a history of architecture swaps... Amazon: with Graviton, very doubtful Intel: um AMD: see Intel Microsoft/Meta/Alphabet: ...maybe? If they started today, they could have a reasonable product by 2030 ARM: 1% probability of a skunkworks product to have the best risc-v CPU once they're something people actually want NVidia: wanted to buy ARM, announced ARM CPUs like yesterday - but why not, except that people don't care? Qualcom: most likely option...?
- logicchains 3y agoAlibaba's already taking the lead on RISC-V, they've even got quad core 2.6 GHz RISC-V laptops: https://www.notebookcheck.net/New-spec-details-and-pricing-for-the-first-RISC-V-laptops-revealed-by-Alibaba.659568.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/New-spec-details-and-pricing-f...
- brucehoult 3y agoBy the time Roma shipped it had a 1.5 GHz quad core Chinese SoC with SiFive cores (JH7110), not the Alibaba THead TH1520 SoC which turned out at only 1.85 GHz anyway. You can buy the same JH7110 SoC in a tablet with docking keyboard&trackpad cover (so pretty much a laptop) for $160 from Pine64 (PineTab-V).
- londons_explore 3y agoHas anyone actually got one of those?
- wrycoder 3y ago$1499??
- mst 3y agoI would imagine the target market for these is "people who want a RISC-V development machine" at which point the price to performance ratio doesn't need to be as good for it to still be useful for the potential customers. That or they don't expect to sell a meaningful number and this one has been productised as a public proof of capability exercise rather than primarily for the sake of the product itself.
- chrsw 3y agoI wonder what they’re capable of with the team that’s left.
- speed_spread 3y agoThey kept just enough people to close the books and sell the company.
- snvzz 3y agoThey fired 20%, not 80%. For all we know, it might be the dead-weight 20%.
- speed_spread 3y agoSo now it's only SiFour?
- snvzz 3y agoThey're now focusing on the 64bit (SIxtyFour bit) ISA.
- antonios 3y agoGood thing I managed to grab a HiFive Unmatched. OpenBSD works sweetly on this.
- KirillPanov 3y agoHope you like those blobs. I'll never forgive SiFive for discontinuing the only blobless RISC-V machine (HiFive Unleashed) after shipping only a few thousand units (which they did only because Debian demanded it as a condition of adding support).
- brucehoult 3y agoHiFive Unleashed ($999 - $1199) was made in no more than about 500-600 units. HiFive Unmatched ($665) had several thousand units built. Absolutely no reason to buy an Unmatched now even if you could because the VisionFive 2 (Star64, Mars) are slightly better in almost every way starting at 1/10th the price.
- formerly_proven 3y agoIs "major changes at [company]" synonymous with layoffs or is there actually another kind of "major change"?
- spaintech 3y agoIs this a coincidence to the NVDIA announcement that they will focusing on ARM chips for the PC? Acquisitions? No source, just pointing out the causality in the timing. I’m not suggesting NVIDIA is buying them, I’m saying that someone could be considering a buy to counter the NVIDIA move.
- bhouston 3y agoI think another factor is that at the high end of RISC-V, Jim Keller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer) ), has his own company that is competing with SiFive: https://tenstorrent.com/risc-v/ https://tenstorrent.com/risc-v/
- mardifoufs 3y agoHave they commercialized any of their designs ? I don't think they are competing with Sifive yet!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- notacoward 3y agoReminds me of a story from one of the startups I worked at. Our CEO found himself in the elevator with the CEO of another company. Other CEO: Ah yes, <company>. I guess that makes us competitors. Our CEO: We'll be competitors when you ship a product.
- snvzz 3y agoLG bought a license for Ascalon, their large (8-wide) RISC-V implementation supposedly competitive with Zen5.
- bhouston 3y agoI love the new CPU wars.
- mardifoufs 3y agoWoah! Is it mostly for internal use for lg electronics? I'm excited to see the performance in real life.
- snvzz 3y agoIIRC the announcements talked smart TVs.
- VyseofArcadia 3y agoI saw this asked the other day but never really saw a satisfactory answer. Why has RISC-V taken off? It's not the only royalty-free ISA. OpenPOWER and OpenSPARC have both been around for almost 20 years with basically 0 enthusiasm.
- itomato 3y agoMaybe because RISC-V was built to be open, not a post-facto?
- nickik 3y agoPeople often asked this but there are a few misconceptions. OpenPOWER was not really 'open' in a meaningful way. It was only RISC-V that made OpenPOWER actually push towards more openness but by then it was to late. OpenSPARC is really only truly open in its 32 bit version. The 64 bit was not open in the same way. Sparc having things like register windows and delay slots also technically didn't have a clear advantage over ARM or MIPS. Also its strong association with Oracle wasn't gone help. RISC-V was truly open from first principle and did some technical clean up. Additionally, very early, before RISC-V was even a standard, they had already released a bunch of 32-bit cores that could compete with ARM cores, and a bunch of students built it. The ISA was easy to build for, and that helped in education. The university of Berkley got eyes on the project and then quickly the ETH and others jumped on in. So there were multiple open cores both in modern Chisel and SystemVerilog. They were also clear about trademarks and how to use them once the foundation was established. There was a path forward to evolve it, not a fixed standard. Companies could get involved and help get RISC-V to where they needed it. In the standard, a way to add custom instructions without clashing with any future RISC-V instruction. OpenSPARC is just a fixed IEEE Standard. There simply wasn't gone be a dynamic Linux like community around OpenSPARC. What Sun did was amazing, but I think people wanted a fresh start with everything we have learned from OpenSource and OpenHardware over the last 30 years. Sometimes things just aren't purely technical, sometimes starting something new just builds a community that dynamically drives things forward.
- RetroTechie 3y ago1. Suited for very small implementations (~$0.10 uCs, tiny FPGA softcores etc). But scales easily to high-performance cpus. 2. Clean slate design, applying latest insights concerning cpu design, virtualization & so on. 3. More a community effort & perhaps more open than other ISAs. OpenSPARC is (unlike early Sparc cpus) targeted at high-performance server / supercomputer chips. Similar for OpenPOWER which is mostly an IBM affair. And opened only around the time RISC-V came out. From what I've read (no personal experience), OpenRISC wasn't that well-designed or lacks RISC-Vs modularity. So a combination of license, community, ISA design & timing of its introduction.
- subharmonicon 3y agoPresumably this includes much of the software team as well although I don’t see them mentioned. Given the number of layers of management I see on LinkedIn, it seems like they could go through a serious flattening and housecleaning and still have a substantial team that could execute on the right vision.
- gigatexal 3y agoIs it a case of being over staffed or is this the slow death of the company? Do they have the talent and bandwidth to really make a viable platform or will they fade into irrelevance? Didn’t they hire recently Lattner and the guy behind the AMD turnaround responsible in large part for the Ryzen line of chips Jim Keller?
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoJim Keller's company is Tenstorrent, not SiFive. https://tenstorrent.com/research/the-ojo-yoshi-report-jim-kellers-journey-from-cpus-to-ceo/ https://tenstorrent.com/research/the-ojo-yoshi-report-jim-ke... But yes, Lattner I think went to SiFive. Is/was he still there?
- lizknope 3y agoI'll start by saying that I am a chip designer for the last 25 years. A former company I worked at about 6 years ago talked to SiFive about a partnership. I'm not sure why the deal fell apart but I was never sure what SiFive's business model was. It seemed to be a lot of different things. They had the cores that you could license but then they also made chips like an SoC similar to to the Broadcom chips on Raspberry Pi systems. In August 2020, SiFive bought Open Silicon. Open Silicon was a design services company started by former Intel people. We hear a lot about Intel wanted to be a foundry like TSMC for external customers. A lot of the design services is physical design (synthesis, place and route, integrating together third party IP like PCIE, DDR, fabrics, controller IP) Intel tries to be a foundry about every 10 years then stops. Either their internal volume gets too high to handle external customers or they don't get enough external customers. SiFive then rebranded the Open Silicon team as OpenFive. I thought they were going to do design services for external customers integrating together their internal RISC-V cores. In September 2022, SiFive sold the OpenFive group to Alphawave. I assume that the design services stuff didn't go well. Most of the companies I know that are using RISC-V are big companies that don't really go to a third party design services company. I'm going to guess that the VC's didn't like the cash burning and lack of revenue and sold OpenFive but now who knows what will happen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-Silicon https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/alphawave-acquires-sifives-openfive-business-for-210-million/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/alphawave-acquire...
- pstrateman 3y agoThe CEO of SiFive at the time of the Open Silicon purchase used to be the CEO of Open Silicon. Big doubt that deal was in the best interest of SiFive, maybe thats why he isnt CEO anymore.
- lizknope 3y agoThanks. I totally missed that. I knew people at Open Silicon around 2010-2014 and interviewed there but didn't join. This industry is so small you run into the same people again and again.
- 3y ago
- gumby 3y agoThis is mostly filler, with the news at the end; the TL;DR is that they may be laying off most of management, engineering and sales; abandoning the core licensing business and becoming an SoC shop like MediaTek. Maybe — can’t tell how much is actually news and how much is surmise.
- nickelpro 3y agoThis could be a major disruption to the open hardware movement in general. LLVM's hardware incubator, CIRCT [1], is hugely driven by SiFive people. Chris Lattner is their President of Platform Engineering. CIRCT is the first interesting thing to happen in the EDA space in decades and I would hate to see it nipped in the bud because of this movement in its chief corporate steward. [1]: https://circt.llvm.org/ https://circt.llvm.org/
- georgelyon 3y agoJust to clarify, Chris hasn’t been working at SiFive for about two years now (he’s working on a new startup called Modular). CIRCT itself has a number of larger companies invested in it, but it’s true that FIRRTL (CIRCT’s replacement compiler back end for Chisel) is predominantly a SiFive joint. I’m cautiously optimistic that there will still be significant investment in this piece of technology.
- pinewurst 3y agoNo one seems to be talking about the elephant in the tent, e.g. that SiFive's IP/implementations aren't very good in terms of performance or even price/performance. There's a small audience (mostly in this thread :) who'll buy any RISC-V for the sake of novelty, but the vast majority requires at least parity with commonly available ARM (primary competition) and SiFive isn't it.
- genmud 3y agoI had actually worked on a greenfield project and was comparing them with ARM, I was quite surprised how expensive they were when you did an apples to apples comparison to ARM. I was expecting like 30-50% savings on ARM, which they wouldn't be anywhere near. They kept mentioning they would match or do better than ARM pricing, but at least with ARM, there was a bit more flexibility (like paying at tapeout, and for startups with ARM it's like $100k for support IIRC).
- camel-cdr 3y agoI'm trying to put this into perspective, and the numbers are a bit weird: October 2023 careers page: >600 employees, > 100 PHDs The about page currently says >180 PhDs design our chips and 85% of employees are engineers, but you can see that between Oct 12 and Oct 15 the number changed from 100 PhDs to 180 PhDs (wayback machine). That's pretty much right before the layoffs, how does that make any sense. (I suppose they may have took some time to update the website) If we go by the 600 number, then this laid off 21% of the company and got 80 new PhDs before the layoff. [1] https://www.sifive.com/about https://www.sifive.com/about
- whoiscroberts 3y agoIs Chris Lattner gone now?
- eigenform 3y agoHoping this doesn't impact forward progress on Chisel and CIRCT; afaik there are lots of folks at SiFive working on tools in this space too
- klelatti 3y agoUpdate from SiFive via Ian Cutress. Looks like 20% of employees are being laid off. https://x.com/IanCutress/status/1716921169553887296?s=20 https://x.com/IanCutress/status/1716921169553887296?s=20
- OhMeadhbh 3y agoI worked at SiFive for about a year in 2018. It was a very poorly organized company with management that was either absent (Shinoy, Sherwani) or unfamiliar with how teams were managed outside academia (Lee). It seemed like Samsung and Intel invested in SiFive mostly to make them (SiFive) look like a going concern so they (Intel) could negotiate better deals with Arm. There were PLENTY of very smart people there, but after buying OpenSilicon it was sort of hard to figure out what they were trying to do. Are they an IP licensing company? Do they design custom cores (or SoCs) for people? Do they make catalog parts? Are they a software company? And then they kept asking too much money from Intel (which had some problems of their own) and they (Intel) walked away from the deal. I don't think SiFive could recover from that.
- simonblack 3y agoJust like the use and spread of 'open-source' Linux is not dependent on any particular company, the use and spread of 'open-source' RISC-V is not dependent on any particular company. Many Linux companies have come and gone. Linux continues to thrive. Likewise many RISC-V companies will come and go. The architecture will live on. I venture to predict that the many proprietary Western-originated CPU architectures will fade away in the decades to come. RISC-V (and/or its successors) will become the world-wide norm, not based in any particular part of the World.
- dingi 3y agoThey could have accepted the Intel's offer buy them. Too late now.
- gattis 3y agoI won $2000 in a programming competition they held at the embedded linux conference, and they never paid me, even after asking twice. Can't say I've been rooting for them since. Never again will I accept a giant check and be told that the real one will come in the mail!