3 ms·

This particular chip is very slow, so definitely not. However Sophgo are going to switch the cores to using SiFive P670 in the next iteration (SG2380) and thos

by rwmj 3y ago

This particular chip is very slow, so definitely not. However Sophgo are going to switch the cores to using SiFive P670 in the next iteration (SG2380) and those cores have much faster single thread performance.

justinclift 3y ago
Is that still happening after SiFive let go a bunch of staff recently? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37996295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37996295
- davidlt 3y ago
  To my understanding SiFive continues to offer their selection of core IP. Anyways, I would assume any existing contract would have to be fulfilled for various legal reasons. SG2042 itself is T-HEAD C920 design which is a mess, and might not be even called a RISC-V compliant design. We are kinda stuck it existing and being used in various chips. There are other design issues discovered IIRC (atomic might not work properly [at least on the kernel side workarounds required]; floating point failures in glibc testsuite because FP not being compliant). SG2044 is scheduled for the next year (2024). Not many details are known: 64 cores, 8 DDR controller, 3x memory bandwidth, vector v1.0 support, 2x PCIe (unknown what that means, Gen3 -> Gen4? More lanes?). The cores are unknown, but SG2038 is SiFive P670. T-HEAD has C908 that support vectors v1.0 (and solves some other issues), but that's a smaller core. Not a replacement for C910/C920.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Thanks, that's good info. :)
- photonbeam 3y ago
  This is dated after the layoffs, so presumably yes https://www.sifive.com/press/sophgo-licenses-sifive-risc-v-processor-cores-to-drive https://www.sifive.com/press/sophgo-licenses-sifive-risc-v-p...
deleted 3y ago
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brucehoult 3y ago
It's not that slow. It's about the same as the AWS Graviton 1 that went into their data centres in 2019, except it's got 64 cores while the Graviton has 16. On tasks that can use all 64 cores (building software, web serving, and yes HPC) it can have about the same total performance as a current generation 16 core x86 that costs about the same.

by rwmj 3y ago

justinclift 3y ago

Is that still happening after SiFive let go a bunch of staff recently? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37996295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37996295

davidlt 3y ago
To my understanding SiFive continues to offer their selection of core IP. Anyways, I would assume any existing contract would have to be fulfilled for various legal reasons. SG2042 itself is T-HEAD C920 design which is a mess, and might not be even called a RISC-V compliant design. We are kinda stuck it existing and being used in various chips. There are other design issues discovered IIRC (atomic might not work properly [at least on the kernel side workarounds required]; floating point failures in glibc testsuite because FP not being compliant). SG2044 is scheduled for the next year (2024). Not many details are known: 64 cores, 8 DDR controller, 3x memory bandwidth, vector v1.0 support, 2x PCIe (unknown what that means, Gen3 -> Gen4? More lanes?). The cores are unknown, but SG2038 is SiFive P670. T-HEAD has C908 that support vectors v1.0 (and solves some other issues), but that's a smaller core. Not a replacement for C910/C920.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Thanks, that's good info. :)
photonbeam 3y ago
This is dated after the layoffs, so presumably yes https://www.sifive.com/press/sophgo-licenses-sifive-risc-v-processor-cores-to-drive https://www.sifive.com/press/sophgo-licenses-sifive-risc-v-p...

deleted 3y ago

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brucehoult 3y ago

It's not that slow. It's about the same as the AWS Graviton 1 that went into their data centres in 2019, except it's got 64 cores while the Graviton has 16. On tasks that can use all 64 cores (building software, web serving, and yes HPC) it can have about the same total performance as a current generation 16 core x86 that costs about the same.