SiFive selects a faster Chinese-made RISC-V CPU instead of an Intel chip for its latest development board

SiFive logo on smartphone
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

SiFive has unveiled the HiFive Premier P550, a new development board using the RISC-V architecture. It will be the first commercially available out-of-order RISC-V development board. Also intriguing (and surprising) is that the new hardware includes a Chinese-made Eswin SoC, even though SiFive is an Intel partner. The new development board is designed for many different market segments and applications, including machine vision, video analysis, and AI.

The P550 comes with 16GB of LPDDR5-6400 memory and a 128GB eMMC SSD for "fast bootable" storage. Connectivity comes in the form of a single PCIe 3.0 x4 interface connected to an x16 slot on the motherboard along with five USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports.

The Eswin EIC7700 SoC features four P550 cores, 256KB of L2 cache, and 4MB of L3 cache. The main selling point of the new chip is its out-of-order capabilities, which allow the processor to reorder instructions to increase throughput and performance. The superscalar P550 can issue three instructions per cycle per core.

Out-of-order CPU designs have been around for a long time, with Intel first adding the feature in the Pentium Pro back in 1995. Out-of-order architectures tend to use more power but offer greater performance. Out-of-order chips are also more vulnerable to side-channel attacks. Smartphones stuck with in-order designs until after 2010, but today, nearly all modern smartphones also feature out-of-order chip architectures.

The P550 SoC also comes with an integrated GPU (no details were provided other than that it offers 2D/3D acceleration), hardware video encoder and decoder, NPU, DSP, MIPI DSI, and a security subsystem. The P550 is designed as a cheaper alternative to the P550 Pro, which debuted last year. The latter sports significantly better connectivity and includes an Intel-made RISC-V "Horse Creek" SoC. Again, it's interesting that the P550 and P550 Pro use completely different core designs.

SiFive partnered up with Canonical to make the P550 compatible with Ubuntu — one of the most popular flavors of Linux. According to Gordan Markus, Silicon Alliances Director at Canonical: “Thanks to our collaboration with SiFive, developers using the HiFive Premier P550 board will be able to innovate at speed with Ubuntu. Additionally, Canonical’s software and services will accelerate time to market, and ensure long-term support and security maintenance for our enterprise partners.”

The P550 has a lot of potential, but availability might be its Achilles heel. According to The Register, the HiFive Pro P550, which launched a year ago, is still almost impossible to find. Hopefully, this same fate doesn't befall the P550.

Since the P550 uses an entirely different CPU from its Pro counterpart, that could help improve availability. SiFive partnered with Intel to create the Horse Creek SoC found in the P550 Pro, but Intel hasn't had a great track record with RISC-V and appears to have no problems killing its own RISC-V projects if necessary.

Due to the P550 Pro's lack of availability, it seems like the Horse Creek CPU was a complete failure — even though Intel says this wasn't the case. Regardless, there must be a very good reason why SiFive (again, a partner with Intel), decided to swing the pendulum the other direction and chose a Chinese-made RISC-V CPU for the P550.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

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  • DavidMV
    Probably because Intel terminated their RISC-V development project last year. I like the idea of RISC-V, but lets be honest, it is a couple decades away from wide adoption (if it ever happens). ARM is still gaining momentum and x86-64 has so much legacy that it is almost impossible for a third ISA to break into the market.
    Reply
  • Findecanor
    RISC-V is already widely adopted for embedded systems, for which ISA legacy matters less.
    Reply
  • DavidMV
    Findecanor said:
    RISC-V is already widely adopted for embedded systems, for which ISA legacy matters less.

    Widely adopted might be a bit of a stretch... Other than Espressif Systems SoCs from China and a few FPGA cores, they are few and far between.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    DavidMV said:
    Widely adopted might be a bit of a stretch... Other than Espressif Systems SoCs from China and a few FPGA cores, they are few and far between.
    I wouldn't be sure of that statement. Apple and Google are already deploying RISC-V SoCs in their devices and QNX supports a few different RISC-V variants which are supposedly in use by both Automotive and Telcos.

    https://www.patentlyapple.com/2021/09/apple-is-reportedly-designing-various-embedded-subsystems-across-all-operating-systems-using-risc-v.html
    https://jobs.apple.com/en-il/details/200530453/arm-risc-v-high-performance-team-manager
    Reply
  • JTWrenn
    Is eMMC really considered fast bootable storage?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    DavidMV said:
    Probably because Intel terminated their RISC-V development project last year.
    You're mischaracterizing that. The goal of Intel's efforts were to help jump-start the RISC-V ecosystem, which their efforts had achieved by the time they were wound down. At the time, Intel themselves said there were already better resources available than their configurator tool, for example.

    DavidMV said:
    I like the idea of RISC-V, but lets be honest, it is a couple decades away from wide adoption (if it ever happens).
    It already has wide adoption in certain embedded markets. As faster & more capable cores become available, it becomes possible to talk about entering new markets with it.
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/risc-v-laptop-looks-like-thinkpad https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/alibaba-claims-it-will-launch-a-server-grade-risc-v-processor-this-year
    DavidMV said:
    ARM is still gaining momentum and x86-64 has so much legacy that it is almost impossible for a third ISA to break into the market.
    ARM is helping drive the development & refinement of emulation technology that is creating an easy path for RISC-V to follow. Going from one ISA to two is much harder than going from two to three!
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    JTWrenn said:
    Is eMMC really considered fast bootable storage?
    Not in my personal opinion. It's better than SD card storage by about 2x, but still really poor when it comes to random reads and writes.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    JamesJones44 said:
    Not in my personal opinion. It's better than SD card storage by about 2x, but still really poor when it comes to random reads and writes.
    Would that not depend at least somewhat on the details of the storage chips used in the eMMC?

    Anyway, I have eMMC in one of my SBCs (ODROID-N2+) and I find it to be quite adequate for casual use. For anything more serious, I'd want to use NVMe, if possible. Even at just PCIe 2.0 x1, that's still 500 MB/s, which is way faster than eMMC and still offers advantages over SATA (even if peak sequential speed is a little lower).
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    bit_user said:
    Would that not depend at least somewhat on the details of the storage chips used in the eMMC?

    Anyway, I have eMMC in one of my SBCs (ODROID-N2+) and I find it to be quite adequate for casual use. For anything more serious, I'd want to use NVMe, if possible. Even at just PCIe 2.0 x1, that's still 500 MB/s, which is way faster than eMMC and still offers advantages over SATA (even if peak sequential speed is a little lower).
    That's fair. I assumed the question pertained to personal use like a mini computer for work which I would not consider eMMC fast bootable. However, for non-time critical embedded and non-interface solutions like a home automation or HMS, etc. it's more than adequate (better than SD cards).
    Reply
  • bit_user
    JamesJones44 said:
    That's fair. I assumed the question pertained to personal use like a mini computer for work which I would not consider eMMC fast bootable.
    Coming from my prior experience of using SD cards on a Pi, it certainly felt fast. That board was the first such device I used that felt reasonable close to the responsiveness of a regular desktop computer. As for boot times, they didn't seem excessive.

    Here's how Hardkernel characterized the eMMC performance of the ODROID-N2+
    "Sequential read and write speed is over 150MB/s and 125MB/s respectively.
    4K random access performance is reasonably fast too. iozone test result are as follows.


    Source: https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-n2-with-4gbyte-ram-2/On the same page, they included data for a UHS SD card and it's about half of the eMMC performance listed above. On my Pi, it was even way slower than that!

    JamesJones44 said:
    However, for non-time critical embedded and non-interface solutions like a home automation or HMS, etc. it's more than adequate (better than SD cards).
    For such tasks, you can use just about anything.
    Reply