Intel officially announced the development of RISC-V processor: the first 7nm process will be launched next year

Recently, there have been rumors in the industry that Intel plans to acquire RISC-V IP supplier SiFive for US$2 billion. The latter's products have been adopted by more than 80 companies, more than 200 products have been designed, with huge shipments and are widely used in various accelerators.

Although both parties declined to comment on the acquisition, in-depth cooperation has already begun.

Intel officially announced that it will build its own RISC-V development platform "Horse Creek", based on SiFive's latest high-performance core Performance P550, and will also use its own next-generation 7nm process.

At the same time, Intel will also open up SiFive IP's foundry manufacturing services to the outside world, also using the 7nm process.

The SiFive Performance P550 core is its most powerful IP, with a SPEC2006int test unit GHz score of 8.65. It supports Linux and fully supports RISC-V vector extension v1.0rc.

It uses a 13-stage pipeline, three-issue, out-of-order execution microarchitecture. Each core has its own 32KB first-level instruction cache, 32KB first-level data cache, and second-level cache. A single cluster has up to 4 cores and shares 4MB of third-level cache.

Intel did not disclose more details about the Horse Creek platform. It is unclear whether it is centered on the RISC-V core or uses it as an auxiliary acceleration core, but it can be seen that Intel does not limit itself to the x86 world and hopes to explore more new ideas.

What’s interesting is the release time. Intel previously said that the 7nm process will be launched in 2023, and the first product will be Meteor Lake (which may become the 14th generation of Core), which will use multiple packaging for the first time.

However, Horse Creek will be released in 2022, which means that if all goes well, it will be the first to be released on Intel 7nm.