20 ms·

SiFive: The road ahead (post layoffs)

80 points by fork-bomber 3y ago

keikobadthebad 3y ago
> Keep moving forward! Except you. And you guys. We don't even know you any more.
xnorswap 3y ago
Maybe I'm not the intended audience, maybe I'm not from a culture that understands posts like this, but this all seems so hollow and tone-deaf. If I didn't otherwise know about the lay-offs it would to me paint an entirely misleading picture, it only hints at redundancies with euphemisms: > need to realign our operations > a need to refocus our priorities > The resulting restructuring And that's it, no other mention, not even an oblique one. And yet the article is full of things like: > SiFive today is in tremendous shape > SiFive’s growth has never been stronger It just comes across as complete bullshit? There's no sense of communicating difficulties, or any sense of humility. Just a lot of "Hoo hah aren't we amazing!".
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  Maybe it was generated using some LLM? :) What would be the prompt?
- alias_neo 3y ago
  My impression, having seen many of these over the years, is that they are just that; hollow, tone-deaf, bullshit. They're basically quotable material for the media. I don't think any ordinary person actually reads these and takes them sincerely; at least I hope not.
- broodbucket 3y ago
  Yeah I don't understand who the target audience is for this. Who would read this and be reassured the company is in tremendous shape? It seems way too far removed from reality
  - vegabook 3y ago
    probably their VCs.
    - Symmetry 3y ago
      No way a VC is going to be satisfied by something like this. And they're getting to look at the actual budget in any event, no need for vague platitudes about being funded. I'd suppose its for the remaining employees who need reassurance but don't get to see the numbers.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  > Maybe I'm not the intended audience, maybe I'm not from a culture that understands posts like this, but this all seems so hollow and tone-deaf. This is written for other c-suite level people and board members, and sadly this hollow pointless communication is the norm for the c-suite and board members. They are not smart people, they don't use language to communicate important information, they don't make choices based on what is best for shareholders, employees, customers or society, they have no useful skill or insight. They are worse than politicians, they hurt shareholders, customers, employees and society. The only people they help are the politically connected Ivy League class, and they are a blight on society.
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  > There's no sense of communicating difficulties, or any sense of humility. If there's any difficulties, that would be financial, no? Does SiFive publish any financial reports? And if so, do those show the company is in financial trouble? Are there well-informed insiders claiming so? Unless that, I'll take the company CEO's word for it. Who writes: "We are very well funded for years to come, with engaged, highly supportive investors, and we are realizing revenues and compounding royalties from many of the world’s leading semiconductor companies." There. So if no money trouble, then what? RISC-V ecosystem growth slowing down? No. SiFive's customers shopping elsewhere? Seems unlikely. Portfolio growing stale/uncompetitive? Hardly. Revenues not (yet?) matching expenses? Who knows. It's a young company still, in a rapidly evolving market. More likely imho: SiFive transitioning from seed stage -> investment rounds & rapid growth -> some kind of 'maintenance mode'. They have an IP portfolio now. So developing that is done. And decided to re-adjust the size of their workforce to better fit what's needed near-future. Leaving 'just' 100s of highly skilled people to work on SiFive's next products. All in all, looks more like a storm in a glass of water to me. It's sad for the people who were laid off, but they'll have good opportunities elsewhere.
  - klelatti 3y ago
    > RISC-V ecosystem growth slowing down? No. Or (their business) not growing as rapidly as they planned or expected and so they have fallen short on their own financial projections and need to adjust. Need to be careful not to conflate SiFive with RISC-V (despite the best efforts of this blog post to do so). They have made their own decisions as to where to compete and that may or may not be the right strategy. SiFive's success or otherwise has implications for RISC-V but RISC-V being a success doesn't imply SiFive will be.
  - sifar 3y ago
    >> They have an IP portfolio now. So developing that is done. Perhaps if you knew semiconductor IP business, you would not say this. It is never done. Stop creating or improving new IPs, and you'll become irrelevant.
dragonelite 3y ago
Will they go the IP troll route in the future after having established quiet a IP portfolio for RISCV.
- klelatti 3y ago
  It's interesting that that they are arguing strongly (vs Qualcomm) for retaining an approach in the ISA that probably requires macro-op fusion - whilst holding at least one patent that relates to macro-op fusion.
  - camel-cdr 3y ago
    I don't think the argument is that much about macro-op fusion vs cracking, as both sides agree that highperformance implementations are doable and not hinderes much buy both. I think the real dispute is how the opcode space and code density will evolve when more and more extension will need to be added. Will more 32 opcode space and 64 bit instructions but no 16 and no 48 bit instructions in the longterm be a better choice than fewer 32 bit insrructions, but 16/48/64 bit instructions?
    - klelatti 3y ago
      That's not my interpretation.
  - fidotron 3y ago
    Have to wonder if the business strategy here is to get Qualcomm to buy what remains for access to these patents thinking Qualcomm will then change their position over the macro op fusion, which would be a classic move by people detached from technical realities.
  - hajile 3y ago
    Neither side is correct IMO. Qualcomm wants 32-bit only instructions, but that leaves out many use cases that require longer instructions. On the flip side, a 48-bit instruction takes FIVE bits just to specify the length which is a massive amount of overhead. I think 64-bit instructions which contain between 1 and 4 instructions (not VLIW as no ILP is specified) would be a better solution offering more compressed instructions and much lower length encoding overhead for 48 and 64-bit instructions while still leaving a potential opening for very long instructions composed of several 64-bit groups. This beats out the Qualcomm proposal in terms of cache, code density, fusion, jumping, and many more without losing any of the benefits of compressed instructions (in fact, it increases the compression benefits).
hashtag-til 3y ago
SiFive: let’s capture this tremendous opportunity!! Yay!! Also SiFive: let’s layoff engineers and reduce our engineering capacity Sounds credible.
- passion__desire 3y ago
  Elon Musk strategy. It's popular these days. More with less. Just pointing out the trend.
  - hashtag-til 3y ago
    Less with less sounds more realistic to me.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Herd behavior. First everyone over-hired during covid since everyone else was, then everyone started laying them off after since they never knew why they hired them to begin with and everyone else is laying off anyway
    - passion__desire 3y ago
      It's also the case VCs don't give me to extend the runway. They want their money to be immediately deployed in building new features, larger headcount and so on. Startups just followed the script.
tw1984 3y ago
Not sure who is that Patrick guy, but that is a horrible long piece of junk with literally no info in it. Other than the mention of AI, there is nothing concrete. I don't know what is the motive, but clearly that Patrick guy is creating doubts and he seems to be pretty good at that. Maybe just another big mouth who wasted way too much time in some fancy corporate PR department?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  https://www.sifive.com/about/patrick-little https://www.sifive.com/about/patrick-little
  - mort96 3y ago
    To save everyone a click: He's the CEO. "Patrick is Chairman, President, and CEO of SiFive".
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      Thanks. I thought the previous experience might be interesting though.
    - PedroBatista 3y ago
      "he was Senior Vice President & General Manager at Qualcomm" He was the Devil's right-hand man. SiFive is lost.. ( joking but only half-joking )
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - zaphirplane 3y ago
      I don’t really get why companies have the same person in so many roles, roles that are supposed to provide differing focus, checks and balances. How much does a company need to suffer before a board builds enough numbers to kick out a person holding those 3 roles
vintermann 3y ago
This letter could easily have been written by GPT3, so I certainly hope the person who would be writing it was one of the people laid off. Somehow I doubt it though.
- nkozyra 3y ago
  > This letter could easily have been written by GPT3 Sure, but could LLMs actually come up with the idea of laying people off? That's where that CEO magic is.
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    An awful lot of marketing puff sounds like GPT3 output. One good consequence of generative "AI" might be that real people start discounting meaningless bafflegab marketing prose as automated nonsense, even if it was deliberately composed by a human. Which in turn might drive PR-type people to learn to write meaningful English. Incidentally, I thought GPT3's summary of the post (upthread) was rather good.
xkzx 3y ago
That's one really big s%^& sandwich.
klelatti 3y ago
Leaving aside the insensitivity of this post towards laid-off staff - which is bad enough - it doesn't actually tell current / prospective customers what has changed about SiFive's business and products. Clearly something has, but this provides no real clues. Completely counterproductive. But all is good as SiFive will revolutionize computing in ways we have not yet begun to imagine!
sylware 3y ago
vanguard and blackrock do prefer to keep only their big tech? (apple/msft/google/etc) Or they did come up with the realization that this Big Tech is toxic for humanity and do invest in stuff in attempt to clean up the mess, for instance trying to make RISC-V a success, that on the worldwide non-free modern ISA issue?
- eru 3y ago
  Large chunks of Vanguard and Blackrock are in index funds. So no amount of realisation about toxicity or heartfelt revelations on the part of Vanguard and Blackrock are going to change what those chunks are invested in.
  - doikor 3y ago
    They can always create a new index and a fund that follows it. But getting people to buy into such a fund is much harder then a fund following some well known index.
    - eru 3y ago
      And new indices get created all the time, plus funds that follow those indices. You often even get new indices specifically created to be easy to invest in (instead of optimizing for the older goal of being some measure of overall market performance.) Vanguard and Blackrock don't necessarily dislike that their hands are bound with the indices. That avoids lots of thorny political problems.
- MangoCoffee 3y ago
  >vanguard and blackrock do prefer to keep only their big tech? maybe because Vanguard is famous for Index funds and it's funds follow index like S&P 500
- meepmorp 3y ago
  Their business is providing investment vehicles, not ideologically driven pursuit of technological advancement.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
petee 3y ago
>SiFive today is in tremendous shape. [...] We are very well funded for years to come Ah, so they did it for more money, not to save the company. Good to know. I feel they could have written a few more hollow words to their ex-coworkers though
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  But even that rings hollow. in this job market, you keep tech people and just reassign them. Hiring people later to execute on the new vision is hard and expensive. Or maybe they're just not planning on growing, which is a brave strategy in the tech world.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Doubtful. In my experience this happens when companies are not in tremendous shape. The most likely sequences of events is: 1. Revenues are not as high as needed. If the current trajectory continues they will run out of money. 2. Therefore they need to change the plan. Changing the plan involves firing a load of people. 3. Everyone assumes (correctly) that that is because they are not doing so well. 4. Post a reassuring blog post that everything is fine. SiFive depends on customer confidence. They probably are well funded for years (2?) to come. And they may be in "tremendous shape" *assuming that their new plan goes as they hope. It does seem a little desperate though. No information on how their new plan is different at all.
wistlo 3y ago
Reads like the materials coming out of AT&T, a very different company but with the same need to obfuscate massive cuts from investment community.
RecycledEle 3y ago
I was 100% sure RISC-V was the future until I read that. Wearables? They're doomed.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  I should have said: I was 100% sure SiFive was the future until I read that. Wearables? They're doomed.
pjmlp 3y ago
Marketing fluff blog post without any reference to what happened to the layed off people.
devit 3y ago
This is what GPT-4 produced when asked to remove the bullshit: SiFive Update - October 26, 2023 After years of growth, SiFive has reassessed its strategies and operations to focus on the most promising opportunities, leading to a restructuring. We believe this change is essential for our continued growth and industry leadership. We are financially stable and continue to secure revenues and royalties from leading semiconductor companies. We are focused on maintaining our technological edge with investments in advanced R&D. We recently launched the SiFive Performance P870 and SiFive Intelligence X390 products. Our commitment to our four product families: Essential, Intelligence, Performance, and Automotive remains strong, targeting sectors such as AI, ADAS, Electric Vehicles, Wearables, and Mobile. With the increasing industry emphasis on AI and the need for adaptability in product design, SiFive aims to offer products that cater to these evolving needs. SiFive has restructured to increase our agility, strengthen partnerships, and maintain our leadership in the RISC-V domain. Regards, Patrick
- dogtierstatus 3y ago
  And please enlighten us with the prompt that helps to remove bs for PR articles
  - keep_reading 3y ago
    You could just use Kagi summarizer which cuts the BS too https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html The Road Ahead discusses the progress and future of RISC-V and SiFive. RISC-V has grown rapidly from a basic ISA to powering high-performance applications. SiFive has also expanded significantly but recently restructured to focus on the most promising opportunities like AI. While this caused speculation, the CEO explains they remain well-funded and committed to delivering the best RISC-V products. As AI is integrated everywhere, RISC-V is becoming critical for its flexibility and ability to meet power and performance needs. SiFive will continue driving the RISC-V revolution across industries like mobile, automotive and datacenters. The CEO is confident SiFive will revolutionize computing in ways not yet imagined.
- MisterTea 3y ago
  Half joking here but I wonder if what you posted is close to what Patrick originally scribbled down then ran through an AI prompt to blow it out. So like encryption, when you put the encrypted text through the cipher you get the original text back.
rmbyrro 3y ago
This Patrick's revolution is putting lead on chips to "increase compute density". They must have used BS-GPT to write that letter.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
"We're doing great! Loads of money and everything is wonderful! Some of you are asking why we fired loads of people and that was a hard decision to make. Everything is getting even better from here!". So... it seems the effect of the post is to further piss off the departed and give the general impression the CEO is incompetent. Any guesses what they wanted to achieve with this piece of marketing?
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Maybe they had an important announcement to make somewhere hidden in paragraph 3/4/5, but it got edited out because it was too contentful, just leaving PR fluff?
- baz00 3y ago
  Well it piqued my interest in non RISC V things.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    SiFive != RISC-V Hopefully, we will be able to allow SiFive to fail gracefully and the architecture will keep going.
    - uticus 3y ago
      I mean, sure, I guess, technically. But really? Look at past submissions here on HN alone. The percentage of headlines containing "SiFive" without "RISC-V" is like minimal. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=sifive&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
      - pclmulqdq 3y ago
        I would suggest that coverage here is somewhat biased. Today, SiFive basically owns the market for high-performance RISC-V cores, and that is the market that really interests HN. That market is also really small. On the low end, there is a vibrant ecosystem of chips and IP providers, and SiFive is actually increasingly uncompetitive. This seems to be where the money really is, but it doesn't make SiFive excited. This market doesn't get cited on HN.
VyseofArcadia 3y ago
Layoffs aside, it's hard as an enthusiast consumer to get excited about RISC-V for the same reason it's hard to get excitrd about ARM. Availability is limited to prepackaged SBCs and tinkering-discouraged consumer products. I'd be so excited if I could buy a chip and a motherboard and just drop them into a standard ATX case. But I don't think there exists a consumer-purchaseable RISC-V or ARM chip that isn't a whole system on a chip.
- speed_spread 3y ago
  ATX boards exist but are not cost effective. The economies of scale of the x64 ecosystem make it impossible to beat. Are you really interested in a 1500$ board and CPU combo that runs slower than an average Best Buy laptop? AMD and Intel are incredibly _cheap_ for the power you get. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/18/adlink-ampere-altra-dev-kit-features-atx-motherboard-with-32-to-80-core-arm-com-hpc-cpu-module/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/18/adlink-ampere-altra-... https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/06/30/64-core-risc-v-motherboard-and-workstation-enables-native-risc-v-development/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/06/30/64-core-risc-v-mothe...
- flashback2199 3y ago
  I've never understood why I as a consumer, even as a developer, would want to get interested in RISC-V, or any architecture, since I'm not sure what, if anything, would be noticeably improved or different to me. Unless it's for curiosity, then that makes sense to me. The only thing Apple Silicon improved on is battery life/power consumption/thermals and yet there are lots of people who think it's better across the board despite faster x86 chips existing on the market. I think excitement about architecture among end users is often not based in reality as the whole point of operating systems and high level languages is to abstract it all away.
  - VyseofArcadia 3y ago
    > I've never understood why I as a consumer, even as a developer, would want to get interested in RISC-V, or any architecture, Why are people into ham radio or trains or mechanical watches? Some people just find stuff neat. I don't have any practical use for a RISC-V mobo that an x64 system couldn't handle. I just think it's cool. It excites me.
londons_explore 3y ago
I still haven't yet figured out if anyone is actually switching any big platforms to RISC-V, or if everyone is just pretending to switch so they can get a free ARM license from ARM (which it seems you only get if you show a prototype of your stuff working on RISC-V and a few blog posts about how RISC-V is the future).
- TradingPlaces 3y ago
  Qualcomm now refers to ARM as a “legacy architecture.” Cold. But in all seriousness, I think RISC-V takes over the low- and mid-segments of embedded, industrial and maybe automotive SoCs
- Symmetry 3y ago
  Yes, in embedded roles. Western Digital's hard driver controllers, NVidia's power controllers, stuff like that and probably a lot more too. Probably more that don't make the news, though this is mostly a thing for companies with the scale and silicon experience that customizing a core to their needs makes business sense.
  - hajile 3y ago
    Even Apple has added job postings for RISC-V devs.
    - klelatti 3y ago
      They have also just signed a new long term contract with Arm.
      - hajile 3y ago
        They use a couple dozen Chinook of soft cores. These are supposedly small 64-bit cores, but ARM requires features they likely don't use and ARM requires payment for each of these cores. Switching these to RISC-V could save area and money without having any effect on their big cores. SiFive claims nearly A78 performance in half the die area. In wearables, this represents a lot of savings in area and probably in power consumption too. This is another move Apple might make as ISA backward-compatibility isn't very important in that market while cost and power are.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Layoffs followed by a round of hiring mean that a company thinks its engineers are making too much money and can be replaced by cheaper hires with the same level of skill. This is one of many reasons why investment capitalism is a really poor method of technological development - a better option would be to reduce the control of external investors and adopt a more democratic internal hiring and promotion policy. Unfortunately four decades of neoliberal government and corporate policy has concentrated all the capital in a few hands, and the outsourcing of much of the hardware manufacturing base overseas has resulted in a decrepit technological base. Thus, I imagine Chinese development of RISC-V is well ahead of whatever SiFive is up to and if they were directly competing, they'd be well behind the curve: https://techwireasia.com/2023/10/do-risc-v-restrictions-signal-the-failure-of-the-us-export-controls-on-china/ https://techwireasia.com/2023/10/do-risc-v-restrictions-sign...
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Counterpoint: the last four decades have seen some of the biggest explosions in technological progress in history. And based on what we've seen, not on anyone's imagination.
  - photochemsyn 3y ago
    Who is to say that the rate of progress wouldn't have been doubled if the constraints of excessive intellectual property laws (a key component of the neoliberal outsourcing program) had been drastically limited? Indeed any analysis of the Chinese technological boom will conclude that their more laissez-faire attitude towards IP played a large role in that outcome. A similar argument is that the open-source movement has become the main driver of software innovation (Linux in the server space etc.) and that without it we'd still be back in the early 2000s tech-wise.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      > Indeed any analysis of the Chinese technological boom will conclude that their more laissez-faire attitude towards IP played a large role in that outcome. That works for catching up; not for moving ahead. > A similar argument is that the open-source movement has become the main driver of software innovation (Linux in the server space etc.) and that without it we'd still be back in the early 2000s tech-wise. The open source movement exists in this timeline.
retrocryptid 3y ago
I would still love to hear SiFive say what business they're in. From the context they're licensing cores, but making a SoC from those cores is still up to the customer. Still... would be nice to get that confirmed by the company themselves.
internet2000 3y ago
> RISC–V is clearly real, growing rapidly and here to stay! Oh yeah they're dead.
pfsalter 3y ago
Every person you hire to help drive a period of growth is someone who will later be fired once that growth (or commonly just funding) runs out. It's very easy to just increase headcount to increase growth but it's not sustainable. I feel like companies often think they're always going up an exponential curve rather than breaching the top of the 'S' and you really need to plan for the long term health of your company. This company obviously hasn't
- TimPC 3y ago
  This is only true if you are measuring growth in extremely dumb ways. Most metrics for growth are revenue-based and if the growth is creating revenue there is nearly always enough money to pay for the roles created to grow the company. If the growth project fails sure you'll need layoffs but you don't need to fire a $300k developer who creates $1M/year in revenue.

80 points by fork-bomber 3y ago

> Keep moving forward! Except you. And you guys. We don't even know you any more.

Maybe I'm not the intended audience, maybe I'm not from a culture that understands posts like this, but this all seems so hollow and tone-deaf. If I didn't otherwise know about the lay-offs it would to me paint an entirely misleading picture, it only hints at redundancies with euphemisms: > need to realign our operations > a need to refocus our priorities > The resulting restructuring And that's it, no other mention, not even an oblique one. And yet the article is full of things like: > SiFive today is in tremendous shape > SiFive’s growth has never been stronger It just comes across as complete bullshit? There's no sense of communicating difficulties, or any sense of humility. Just a lot of "Hoo hah aren't we amazing!".

hashtag-til 3y ago
Maybe it was generated using some LLM? :) What would be the prompt?
alias_neo 3y ago
My impression, having seen many of these over the years, is that they are just that; hollow, tone-deaf, bullshit. They're basically quotable material for the media. I don't think any ordinary person actually reads these and takes them sincerely; at least I hope not.
broodbucket 3y ago
Yeah I don't understand who the target audience is for this. Who would read this and be reassured the company is in tremendous shape? It seems way too far removed from reality
- vegabook 3y ago
  probably their VCs.
  - Symmetry 3y ago
    No way a VC is going to be satisfied by something like this. And they're getting to look at the actual budget in any event, no need for vague platitudes about being funded. I'd suppose its for the remaining employees who need reassurance but don't get to see the numbers.
flanked-evergl 3y ago
> Maybe I'm not the intended audience, maybe I'm not from a culture that understands posts like this, but this all seems so hollow and tone-deaf. This is written for other c-suite level people and board members, and sadly this hollow pointless communication is the norm for the c-suite and board members. They are not smart people, they don't use language to communicate important information, they don't make choices based on what is best for shareholders, employees, customers or society, they have no useful skill or insight. They are worse than politicians, they hurt shareholders, customers, employees and society. The only people they help are the politically connected Ivy League class, and they are a blight on society.
RetroTechie 3y ago
> There's no sense of communicating difficulties, or any sense of humility. If there's any difficulties, that would be financial, no? Does SiFive publish any financial reports? And if so, do those show the company is in financial trouble? Are there well-informed insiders claiming so? Unless that, I'll take the company CEO's word for it. Who writes: "We are very well funded for years to come, with engaged, highly supportive investors, and we are realizing revenues and compounding royalties from many of the world’s leading semiconductor companies." There. So if no money trouble, then what? RISC-V ecosystem growth slowing down? No. SiFive's customers shopping elsewhere? Seems unlikely. Portfolio growing stale/uncompetitive? Hardly. Revenues not (yet?) matching expenses? Who knows. It's a young company still, in a rapidly evolving market. More likely imho: SiFive transitioning from seed stage -> investment rounds & rapid growth -> some kind of 'maintenance mode'. They have an IP portfolio now. So developing that is done. And decided to re-adjust the size of their workforce to better fit what's needed near-future. Leaving 'just' 100s of highly skilled people to work on SiFive's next products. All in all, looks more like a storm in a glass of water to me. It's sad for the people who were laid off, but they'll have good opportunities elsewhere.
- klelatti 3y ago
  > RISC-V ecosystem growth slowing down? No. Or (their business) not growing as rapidly as they planned or expected and so they have fallen short on their own financial projections and need to adjust. Need to be careful not to conflate SiFive with RISC-V (despite the best efforts of this blog post to do so). They have made their own decisions as to where to compete and that may or may not be the right strategy. SiFive's success or otherwise has implications for RISC-V but RISC-V being a success doesn't imply SiFive will be.
- sifar 3y ago
  >> They have an IP portfolio now. So developing that is done. Perhaps if you knew semiconductor IP business, you would not say this. It is never done. Stop creating or improving new IPs, and you'll become irrelevant.

dragonelite 3y ago

Will they go the IP troll route in the future after having established quiet a IP portfolio for RISCV.

klelatti 3y ago
It's interesting that that they are arguing strongly (vs Qualcomm) for retaining an approach in the ISA that probably requires macro-op fusion - whilst holding at least one patent that relates to macro-op fusion.
- camel-cdr 3y ago
  I don't think the argument is that much about macro-op fusion vs cracking, as both sides agree that highperformance implementations are doable and not hinderes much buy both. I think the real dispute is how the opcode space and code density will evolve when more and more extension will need to be added. Will more 32 opcode space and 64 bit instructions but no 16 and no 48 bit instructions in the longterm be a better choice than fewer 32 bit insrructions, but 16/48/64 bit instructions?
  - klelatti 3y ago
    That's not my interpretation.
- fidotron 3y ago
  Have to wonder if the business strategy here is to get Qualcomm to buy what remains for access to these patents thinking Qualcomm will then change their position over the macro op fusion, which would be a classic move by people detached from technical realities.
- hajile 3y ago
  Neither side is correct IMO. Qualcomm wants 32-bit only instructions, but that leaves out many use cases that require longer instructions. On the flip side, a 48-bit instruction takes FIVE bits just to specify the length which is a massive amount of overhead. I think 64-bit instructions which contain between 1 and 4 instructions (not VLIW as no ILP is specified) would be a better solution offering more compressed instructions and much lower length encoding overhead for 48 and 64-bit instructions while still leaving a potential opening for very long instructions composed of several 64-bit groups. This beats out the Qualcomm proposal in terms of cache, code density, fusion, jumping, and many more without losing any of the benefits of compressed instructions (in fact, it increases the compression benefits).

hashtag-til 3y ago

SiFive: let’s capture this tremendous opportunity!! Yay!! Also SiFive: let’s layoff engineers and reduce our engineering capacity Sounds credible.

passion__desire 3y ago
Elon Musk strategy. It's popular these days. More with less. Just pointing out the trend.
- hashtag-til 3y ago
  Less with less sounds more realistic to me.
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Herd behavior. First everyone over-hired during covid since everyone else was, then everyone started laying them off after since they never knew why they hired them to begin with and everyone else is laying off anyway
  - passion__desire 3y ago
    It's also the case VCs don't give me to extend the runway. They want their money to be immediately deployed in building new features, larger headcount and so on. Startups just followed the script.

tw1984 3y ago

Not sure who is that Patrick guy, but that is a horrible long piece of junk with literally no info in it. Other than the mention of AI, there is nothing concrete. I don't know what is the motive, but clearly that Patrick guy is creating doubts and he seems to be pretty good at that. Maybe just another big mouth who wasted way too much time in some fancy corporate PR department?

quickthrower2 3y ago
https://www.sifive.com/about/patrick-little https://www.sifive.com/about/patrick-little
- mort96 3y ago
  To save everyone a click: He's the CEO. "Patrick is Chairman, President, and CEO of SiFive".
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    Thanks. I thought the previous experience might be interesting though.
  - PedroBatista 3y ago
    "he was Senior Vice President & General Manager at Qualcomm" He was the Devil's right-hand man. SiFive is lost.. ( joking but only half-joking )
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - zaphirplane 3y ago
    I don’t really get why companies have the same person in so many roles, roles that are supposed to provide differing focus, checks and balances. How much does a company need to suffer before a board builds enough numbers to kick out a person holding those 3 roles

vintermann 3y ago

This letter could easily have been written by GPT3, so I certainly hope the person who would be writing it was one of the people laid off. Somehow I doubt it though.

nkozyra 3y ago
> This letter could easily have been written by GPT3 Sure, but could LLMs actually come up with the idea of laying people off? That's where that CEO magic is.
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  An awful lot of marketing puff sounds like GPT3 output. One good consequence of generative "AI" might be that real people start discounting meaningless bafflegab marketing prose as automated nonsense, even if it was deliberately composed by a human. Which in turn might drive PR-type people to learn to write meaningful English. Incidentally, I thought GPT3's summary of the post (upthread) was rather good.

xkzx 3y ago

That's one really big s%^& sandwich.

klelatti 3y ago

Leaving aside the insensitivity of this post towards laid-off staff - which is bad enough - it doesn't actually tell current / prospective customers what has changed about SiFive's business and products. Clearly something has, but this provides no real clues. Completely counterproductive. But all is good as SiFive will revolutionize computing in ways we have not yet begun to imagine!

sylware 3y ago

vanguard and blackrock do prefer to keep only their big tech? (apple/msft/google/etc) Or they did come up with the realization that this Big Tech is toxic for humanity and do invest in stuff in attempt to clean up the mess, for instance trying to make RISC-V a success, that on the worldwide non-free modern ISA issue?

eru 3y ago
Large chunks of Vanguard and Blackrock are in index funds. So no amount of realisation about toxicity or heartfelt revelations on the part of Vanguard and Blackrock are going to change what those chunks are invested in.
- doikor 3y ago
  They can always create a new index and a fund that follows it. But getting people to buy into such a fund is much harder then a fund following some well known index.
  - eru 3y ago
    And new indices get created all the time, plus funds that follow those indices. You often even get new indices specifically created to be easy to invest in (instead of optimizing for the older goal of being some measure of overall market performance.) Vanguard and Blackrock don't necessarily dislike that their hands are bound with the indices. That avoids lots of thorny political problems.
MangoCoffee 3y ago
>vanguard and blackrock do prefer to keep only their big tech? maybe because Vanguard is famous for Index funds and it's funds follow index like S&P 500
meepmorp 3y ago
Their business is providing investment vehicles, not ideologically driven pursuit of technological advancement.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

petee 3y ago

>SiFive today is in tremendous shape. [...] We are very well funded for years to come Ah, so they did it for more money, not to save the company. Good to know. I feel they could have written a few more hollow words to their ex-coworkers though

retrocryptid 3y ago
But even that rings hollow. in this job market, you keep tech people and just reassign them. Hiring people later to execute on the new vision is hard and expensive. Or maybe they're just not planning on growing, which is a brave strategy in the tech world.
IshKebab 3y ago
Doubtful. In my experience this happens when companies are not in tremendous shape. The most likely sequences of events is: 1. Revenues are not as high as needed. If the current trajectory continues they will run out of money. 2. Therefore they need to change the plan. Changing the plan involves firing a load of people. 3. Everyone assumes (correctly) that that is because they are not doing so well. 4. Post a reassuring blog post that everything is fine. SiFive depends on customer confidence. They probably are well funded for years (2?) to come. And they may be in "tremendous shape" *assuming that their new plan goes as they hope. It does seem a little desperate though. No information on how their new plan is different at all.

wistlo 3y ago

Reads like the materials coming out of AT&T, a very different company but with the same need to obfuscate massive cuts from investment community.

RecycledEle 3y ago

I was 100% sure RISC-V was the future until I read that. Wearables? They're doomed.

RecycledEle 3y ago
I should have said: I was 100% sure SiFive was the future until I read that. Wearables? They're doomed.

pjmlp 3y ago

Marketing fluff blog post without any reference to what happened to the layed off people.

devit 3y ago

This is what GPT-4 produced when asked to remove the bullshit: SiFive Update - October 26, 2023 After years of growth, SiFive has reassessed its strategies and operations to focus on the most promising opportunities, leading to a restructuring. We believe this change is essential for our continued growth and industry leadership. We are financially stable and continue to secure revenues and royalties from leading semiconductor companies. We are focused on maintaining our technological edge with investments in advanced R&D. We recently launched the SiFive Performance P870 and SiFive Intelligence X390 products. Our commitment to our four product families: Essential, Intelligence, Performance, and Automotive remains strong, targeting sectors such as AI, ADAS, Electric Vehicles, Wearables, and Mobile. With the increasing industry emphasis on AI and the need for adaptability in product design, SiFive aims to offer products that cater to these evolving needs. SiFive has restructured to increase our agility, strengthen partnerships, and maintain our leadership in the RISC-V domain. Regards, Patrick

dogtierstatus 3y ago
And please enlighten us with the prompt that helps to remove bs for PR articles
- keep_reading 3y ago
  You could just use Kagi summarizer which cuts the BS too https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html The Road Ahead discusses the progress and future of RISC-V and SiFive. RISC-V has grown rapidly from a basic ISA to powering high-performance applications. SiFive has also expanded significantly but recently restructured to focus on the most promising opportunities like AI. While this caused speculation, the CEO explains they remain well-funded and committed to delivering the best RISC-V products. As AI is integrated everywhere, RISC-V is becoming critical for its flexibility and ability to meet power and performance needs. SiFive will continue driving the RISC-V revolution across industries like mobile, automotive and datacenters. The CEO is confident SiFive will revolutionize computing in ways not yet imagined.
MisterTea 3y ago
Half joking here but I wonder if what you posted is close to what Patrick originally scribbled down then ran through an AI prompt to blow it out. So like encryption, when you put the encrypted text through the cipher you get the original text back.

rmbyrro 3y ago

This Patrick's revolution is putting lead on chips to "increase compute density". They must have used BS-GPT to write that letter.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

"We're doing great! Loads of money and everything is wonderful! Some of you are asking why we fired loads of people and that was a hard decision to make. Everything is getting even better from here!". So... it seems the effect of the post is to further piss off the departed and give the general impression the CEO is incompetent. Any guesses what they wanted to achieve with this piece of marketing?

londons_explore 3y ago
Maybe they had an important announcement to make somewhere hidden in paragraph 3/4/5, but it got edited out because it was too contentful, just leaving PR fluff?
baz00 3y ago
Well it piqued my interest in non RISC V things.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  SiFive != RISC-V Hopefully, we will be able to allow SiFive to fail gracefully and the architecture will keep going.
  - uticus 3y ago
    I mean, sure, I guess, technically. But really? Look at past submissions here on HN alone. The percentage of headlines containing "SiFive" without "RISC-V" is like minimal. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=sifive&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    - pclmulqdq 3y ago
      I would suggest that coverage here is somewhat biased. Today, SiFive basically owns the market for high-performance RISC-V cores, and that is the market that really interests HN. That market is also really small. On the low end, there is a vibrant ecosystem of chips and IP providers, and SiFive is actually increasingly uncompetitive. This seems to be where the money really is, but it doesn't make SiFive excited. This market doesn't get cited on HN.

VyseofArcadia 3y ago

Layoffs aside, it's hard as an enthusiast consumer to get excited about RISC-V for the same reason it's hard to get excitrd about ARM. Availability is limited to prepackaged SBCs and tinkering-discouraged consumer products. I'd be so excited if I could buy a chip and a motherboard and just drop them into a standard ATX case. But I don't think there exists a consumer-purchaseable RISC-V or ARM chip that isn't a whole system on a chip.

speed_spread 3y ago
ATX boards exist but are not cost effective. The economies of scale of the x64 ecosystem make it impossible to beat. Are you really interested in a 1500$ board and CPU combo that runs slower than an average Best Buy laptop? AMD and Intel are incredibly _cheap_ for the power you get. https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/18/adlink-ampere-altra-dev-kit-features-atx-motherboard-with-32-to-80-core-arm-com-hpc-cpu-module/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/04/18/adlink-ampere-altra-... https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/06/30/64-core-risc-v-motherboard-and-workstation-enables-native-risc-v-development/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2023/06/30/64-core-risc-v-mothe...
flashback2199 3y ago
I've never understood why I as a consumer, even as a developer, would want to get interested in RISC-V, or any architecture, since I'm not sure what, if anything, would be noticeably improved or different to me. Unless it's for curiosity, then that makes sense to me. The only thing Apple Silicon improved on is battery life/power consumption/thermals and yet there are lots of people who think it's better across the board despite faster x86 chips existing on the market. I think excitement about architecture among end users is often not based in reality as the whole point of operating systems and high level languages is to abstract it all away.
- VyseofArcadia 3y ago
  > I've never understood why I as a consumer, even as a developer, would want to get interested in RISC-V, or any architecture, Why are people into ham radio or trains or mechanical watches? Some people just find stuff neat. I don't have any practical use for a RISC-V mobo that an x64 system couldn't handle. I just think it's cool. It excites me.

londons_explore 3y ago

I still haven't yet figured out if anyone is actually switching any big platforms to RISC-V, or if everyone is just pretending to switch so they can get a free ARM license from ARM (which it seems you only get if you show a prototype of your stuff working on RISC-V and a few blog posts about how RISC-V is the future).

TradingPlaces 3y ago
Qualcomm now refers to ARM as a “legacy architecture.” Cold. But in all seriousness, I think RISC-V takes over the low- and mid-segments of embedded, industrial and maybe automotive SoCs
Symmetry 3y ago
Yes, in embedded roles. Western Digital's hard driver controllers, NVidia's power controllers, stuff like that and probably a lot more too. Probably more that don't make the news, though this is mostly a thing for companies with the scale and silicon experience that customizing a core to their needs makes business sense.
- hajile 3y ago
  Even Apple has added job postings for RISC-V devs.
  - klelatti 3y ago
    They have also just signed a new long term contract with Arm.
    - hajile 3y ago
      They use a couple dozen Chinook of soft cores. These are supposedly small 64-bit cores, but ARM requires features they likely don't use and ARM requires payment for each of these cores. Switching these to RISC-V could save area and money without having any effect on their big cores. SiFive claims nearly A78 performance in half the die area. In wearables, this represents a lot of savings in area and probably in power consumption too. This is another move Apple might make as ISA backward-compatibility isn't very important in that market while cost and power are.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Layoffs followed by a round of hiring mean that a company thinks its engineers are making too much money and can be replaced by cheaper hires with the same level of skill. This is one of many reasons why investment capitalism is a really poor method of technological development - a better option would be to reduce the control of external investors and adopt a more democratic internal hiring and promotion policy. Unfortunately four decades of neoliberal government and corporate policy has concentrated all the capital in a few hands, and the outsourcing of much of the hardware manufacturing base overseas has resulted in a decrepit technological base. Thus, I imagine Chinese development of RISC-V is well ahead of whatever SiFive is up to and if they were directly competing, they'd be well behind the curve: https://techwireasia.com/2023/10/do-risc-v-restrictions-signal-the-failure-of-the-us-export-controls-on-china/ https://techwireasia.com/2023/10/do-risc-v-restrictions-sign...

robertlagrant 3y ago
Counterpoint: the last four decades have seen some of the biggest explosions in technological progress in history. And based on what we've seen, not on anyone's imagination.
- photochemsyn 3y ago
  Who is to say that the rate of progress wouldn't have been doubled if the constraints of excessive intellectual property laws (a key component of the neoliberal outsourcing program) had been drastically limited? Indeed any analysis of the Chinese technological boom will conclude that their more laissez-faire attitude towards IP played a large role in that outcome. A similar argument is that the open-source movement has become the main driver of software innovation (Linux in the server space etc.) and that without it we'd still be back in the early 2000s tech-wise.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    > Indeed any analysis of the Chinese technological boom will conclude that their more laissez-faire attitude towards IP played a large role in that outcome. That works for catching up; not for moving ahead. > A similar argument is that the open-source movement has become the main driver of software innovation (Linux in the server space etc.) and that without it we'd still be back in the early 2000s tech-wise. The open source movement exists in this timeline.

retrocryptid 3y ago

I would still love to hear SiFive say what business they're in. From the context they're licensing cores, but making a SoC from those cores is still up to the customer. Still... would be nice to get that confirmed by the company themselves.

internet2000 3y ago

> RISC–V is clearly real, growing rapidly and here to stay! Oh yeah they're dead.

pfsalter 3y ago

Every person you hire to help drive a period of growth is someone who will later be fired once that growth (or commonly just funding) runs out. It's very easy to just increase headcount to increase growth but it's not sustainable. I feel like companies often think they're always going up an exponential curve rather than breaching the top of the 'S' and you really need to plan for the long term health of your company. This company obviously hasn't

TimPC 3y ago
This is only true if you are measuring growth in extremely dumb ways. Most metrics for growth are revenue-based and if the growth is creating revenue there is nearly always enough money to pay for the roles created to grow the company. If the growth project fails sure you'll need layoffs but you don't need to fire a $300k developer who creates $1M/year in revenue.