SiFive Announces 4th Generation of Popular Essential Product Line to Spur Innovation Across Embedded Applications

SiFive is seeing growing adoption, with more than two billion SiFive RISC-V based chips already in the market

MUNICH--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today SiFive, Inc., the gold standard for RISC-V computing, is unveiling a major upgrade of its SiFive Essential product family at the RISC-V Summit Europe 2024. Developed over a decade, the field-proven Essential IP is already in use in billions of products including mobile phones, sensors, SSDs, FPGA platforms, surveillance cameras, smartwatches and more. This full-portfolio refresh brings higher performance, improved power efficiency and more flexible interfaces, with configuration and integration options to cover virtually any possibility. The SiFive Essential Gen4 products are available today.

“The best RISC-V embedded solutions just got much better with this fourth generation,” said John Ronco, SiFive SVP of Product. “With the benefits of cost-effective flexibility, performance and low power, RISC-V has won the battle for embedded. As legacy ISAs have reduced R&D and support, we are expanding SiFive’s broad portfolio of market leading Essential products and reaffirming our commitment and support for customers in these critical areas of innovation.”

SiFive has seen strong momentum across embedded segments where the Essential Gen4 products will bring impressive flexibility and features to enable customers to better tailor their designs. More than two billion SiFive RISC-V based chips for embedded devices have shipped to-date and the market continues to grow rapidly.

“The embedded space in 2024 represents a huge ($257 billion) market opportunity, growing with an 8.3% CAGR through 2030. RISC-V and SiFive have been increasingly gaining momentum and taking share from the other ISAs. SiFive is launching the products that these customers need while also innovating at the high performance and advanced AI levels,” said Rich Wawrzyniak, Principal Analyst at The SHD Group. “It is a mistake to discount the importance of embedded products as the flexibility and software portability of RISC-V makes designing products with multiple cores—including the highest performance cores—easier, creating a clear pathway for RISC-V into the next generations of high-performance chips.”

Essential Gen4 IP Portfolio Features:

• Broadest RISC-V CPU and system IP portfolio
• Up to 40% runtime power reduction
• 8 different baseline embedded 32-bit and 64-bit cores
• From 2 stage single-issue to 8 stage superscalar
• Improved L2 cache and enhanced L1 memory
• Extensive configuration and integration options
  • CPU type, profile and options
  • On-chip memories selection
  • System, peripheral and front ports
• Advanced power management and security
• Debug and trace
• Leading software support, including embedded Linux, FreeRTOS, Eclipse C/C++/ IDE

Essential Gen4 portfolio

	2-3 stage single issue with lowest power and area	8-stage single issue for performance efficiency	8-stage dual issue for highest performance
64-bit Application processors		U6 Gen4	U7 Gen4
64-bit real-time Embedded processors	S2 Gen4	S6 Gen4	S7 Gen4
32-bit real-time Embedded processors	E2 Gen4	E6 Gen4	E7 Gen4

Learn more about the SiFive Essential product family here https://www.sifive.com/cores/essential.

About SiFive

As the pioneers who introduced RISC-V to the world, SiFive is transforming the future of compute by bringing the limitless potential of RISC-V to the highest performance and most data-intensive applications in the world. SiFive’s unrivaled compute platforms have enabled leading technology companies around the world to innovate, optimize and deliver the most advanced solutions of tomorrow across every market segment of chip design, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, data center, mobile, and consumer. With SiFive, the future of RISC-V has no limits.