SiFive hones Risc-V cores for more processing power and fewer watts – Electronics Weekly

The release has been dubbed 20G1, as the company has switched from year-month naming to year-release naming: 20G1 being the first general release of 2020 and encapsulates nine months of hard work and progress at SiFive as we move to a new release schedule driven by our road-maps and aligned to customer engineering cycles, it said.

Enhancements to the high-end Linux-capable U7-Series application processor are claimed to have reduced power consumption by more than 25%, while increasing load bandwidth up to 2.8x for streaming data applications such as AI acceleration that is comparing the 20G1 U74 processor with the previous (August 2019) U74 running running Dhrystone. Other SiFive cores also feature reduced power consumption, SiFive is highlighting the power saving in the U74 as a best case, the company told Electronics Weekly.

Another change is that the low-end E3-Series and E7-Series are now available with the RISC-V embedded extension, called RV32E, which can reduce 28nm chip area by up to 11% compared to RV32I implementation.

Based on customer feedback, RV32E will be a popular option for product designers who need area-constrained high-performance embedded CPUs, said SiFive, adding: The SiFive 3-, 5-, and 7-Series cores have been refreshed with new, enhanced real-time capabilities, bringing deterministic performance for high-reliability designs to SiFives product portfolio.

An add-on to 20G1 is support for SiFive Shield Hardware Cryptographic Accelerator intellectual property, offeringa configurable mix of AES, SHA, and TRNG functions to add secure root-of-trust and hardware cryptography acceleration.

In addition, pre-integration of SiFives Insight trace and debug block will speed use of Arms CoreSight tool, said SiFive: By seamlessly integrating with CoreSight, developers can integrate SiFive Risc-V based cores into mixed ISA [instruction set] designs and maintain their existing development environment. Insight is the industrys first pre-integrated debug and trace IP for RISC-V processor cores.

One last announcement is aimed at users of FreeRTOS:SiFives Freedom E SDK now includes FreeRTOS v.10, with source code and build scripts. Alongside the FreeRTOS kernel, the SiFive Freedom E SDK features several FreeRTOS-based examples, including using physical memory protection to enable secure run-time operations, said the company. Associated board support packages have been upgraded to include SVD (System View Description) for debug environment integration.

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SiFive hones Risc-V cores for more processing power and fewer watts - Electronics Weekly