At least it won’t let those AI accelerators be designed by Arm.After a tough 2023, the situation for RISC-V chip design company SiFive may be improving, as the company expects strong revenue growth driven by AI in 2024.Documents obtained by Bloomberg this week indicate that the second-generation processors designed for AI servers will help this Silicon Valley upstart rebound against the odds, at least that is what the company hopes.Although Bloomberg did not specify which chip series was being discussed, “second-generation” could imply (not yet confirmed) that both parties will expand their collaboration to provide SiFive processor cores for Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPU).These AI accelerators from Google are currently in their fifth generation, originally designed to accelerate the processing of Google’s internal machine learning workloads. Recently, this search giant has begun to offer AI accelerators to the public for running its own AI training and inference tasks.As previously reported by the media, at least some of these accelerators are already using SiFive’s Intelligence X280 core as a co-processor to manage devices and feed the data that needs to be processed to Google’s Matrix Multiply Unit (MXU).Besides Google’s use of these cores, we do not know if they have ever been deployed on a large scale, or if they were just implemented as experimental units. Google may be waiting for the second generation for broader deployment.All we know is that last October, SiFive announced the launch of the successor to the X280, the X390, as well as the performance-optimized P870 core. The X390 may serve as the foundation for the aforementioned second-generation product.The X390 is a 64-bit RISC-V processor core specifically designed to accelerate large vector instructions common in AI/machine learning workloads. It provides an instruction set similar to Intel’s AVX512. More importantly, this core features SiFive’s Vector Co-Processor Interface Extension (VCIX), which will enable it to integrate with Google’s MXU.In any case, the above documents seem to indicate that SiFive’s licensing and patent revenue will rise significantly.According to Bloomberg, SiFive currently expects sales of at least $241 million in 2024. This marks a significant turnaround for the company, which reported a net income of only $38.2 million in 2023, with an operating loss of $113 million that year.Despite support from major chip manufacturers including Intel and Qualcomm, SiFive faces significant resistance in challenging rival Arm. Last October, this RISC-V CPU design company laid off 20% of its workforce during a corporate restructuring.Meanwhile, at the national government level, RISC-V faces the predicament of U.S. lawmakers calling for restrictions on exports of RV designs to China.
