We are now learning new details about the outcome of our partnership between sci five When intelThe two companies have announced that the HiFive Pro P550 development board will be released in summer 2023.
HiFive Pro P550 is powered by the ‘Horse Creek’ SoC with a quad-core, 64-bit RISC-V design. The SoC features private L2 memory, with 128KB allocated to each core and a total of 2MB of L3 cache shared by all 4 of his cores. According to Intel, the SoC will run above 2 GHz. Another important thing to remember is that the Pro 550 is built on the Intel 4 process (7nm in traditional process node terms) by Intel Foundry Services.
“When we first saw this opportunity with RISC-V, our first thought was: Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of developers. What do they need to develop software? ?” said Nikhil Krishna Gopalakrishna, principal engineer at Intel. “The core is great. Then let’s gather the most important peripherals around it to enable the development of a great ecosystem.”
The board itself features a microATX form factor (244mm x 244mm) and 16GB of onboard DDR5-5600 memory. It also includes 2 PCIe 5.0 expansion slots, integrated graphics, 10 GbE, and 8 USB ports (2 USB 2.0 and 6 USB 3.0). There are also two M.2 expansion slots (2230 and 2280).
Sam Grove, Head of Product Management at SiFive, said: “It’s for people building software, packaging software, and distributing software to the rest of the ecosystem.”
In terms of use cases, Intel envisions the HiFive Pro P550 development board targeting premium software development, developer desktops, and RISC-V rack systems. However, given that the HiFive Pro P550 is aimed at the developer community, no word on pricing for everyday users looking to get their hands on it.
Intel attempted to acquire SiFive in 2021, but it’s worth noting that the two companies couldn’t agree on financial terms (a reported $2 billion) or how to integrate the latter into the former. Nonetheless, Intel is looking for ways to expand beyond the traditional x86 architecture used in its CPUs, and RISC-V has a lot of potential in low-power applications.
SiFive’s next-generation RISC-V products include the P670 and its low-power companion chip, the P470, targeted at “next-generation wearable and smart consumer devices.” The P670 is built on the 5nm process node and features clock speeds of over 3.4GHz.
