🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Funding ties to a specific chip and early customer use

• SiFive’s 3rd generation Performance P870-D, built to compete with Arm’s Neoverse N2 class in the data center, is running in customer silicon 1.
• A tier-1 hyperscaler (a very large cloud company) is profiling P870-D cores on video encoding, recommender systems, and big data analytics 2.
• The same customer expects server-specific SoCs, or systems on a chip that combine multiple computing functions into one chip, based on this design in the second half of 2025 2.
• SiFive said 2025 revenue hit a company record and grew more than 50% year over year 1.

Nvidia plans NVLink Fusion support for SiFive RISC-V platforms

• Alongside the investment, SiFive says it is adopting Nvidia NVLink Fusion in its high-performance data center-class products 3.
• The goal is coherent links between customizable RISC-V CPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and other accelerators for tightly integrated AI systems 3.
• RVA23 ratification, a technical specification meant to improve software compatibility across RISC-V chips, has boosted ecosystem support. That includes Nvidia’s CUDA porting announcement with no timeline disclosed, plus major Linux distribution work 4.
• Nvidia’s support for a customizable, open-standard architecture gives hyperscalers a path to more power-efficient specialized AI systems beyond the usual server CPU market led by a handful of vendors 5.