SiFive Unveils P870-D CPU for Data Center with Enhanced Features

TapTechNews August 15th news, RISC-V IP enterprise SiFive locally announced yesterday the launch of the P870-D CPU design for data center applications.

The P870-D is built on the P870 high-performance core released by SiFive in 2023 and has added many functions for data center applications:

The P870-D supports the open AMBACHI protocol, with up to 64 cores in a single cluster and up to 256 cores in total, while the original P870 supports up to 32-core clusters;

SiFive has also added RAS functionality to the P870-D, which can detect errors before problems occur and protect data integrity, helping to prevent downtime and ensure the overall reliability of the system;

In addition, the P870-D also contains a distributed and scalable IOMMU (TapTechNews note: Input-Output Memory Management Unit) for accelerating virtualized device IO.

SiFive senior director Ian Ferguson told foreign media TheRegister that, according to SiFive's test results on TSMC's 3nm process, the performance of P870-D is comparable to that of Arm Neoverse N2, but only 3/4 of the latter's size.

John Ronco, SiFive's senior vice president of products, said in a press release:

SiFive brings a concise and modern approach to the era of artificial intelligence through a broad portfolio of RISC-V solutions. The new P870-D enhances our proven high-performance architecture and raises performance, flexibility and scalability to new levels.

SiFive's complete set of solutions (including software, IOMMU, interrupt controllers and other non-core modules) combined with our intelligent processor dedicated to AI enables our customers to easily achieve the most effective performance/power/cost metrics for AI and data center workloads.

SiFive P870-D processors are currently being sampled to major customers, and the final production version will be released before the end of 2024.