Three Cheers for Our Very Own Turing Award Winner!

At the SiFive Unleashed event, we had the opportunity to congratulate one of our most trusted advisors, David Patterson, who – along with his longtime collaborator John Hennessey – was named a recipient of the 2017 Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for his work in developing a new approach to designing fast, low-power, reduced instruction set computer microprocessors – a.k.a. RISC processors! Being named a Turing laureate is among the highest honors in the industry, and it recognizes lifetime achievement in advancing the course of computing. 

Patterson’s work with RISC dates back to the early 1980s, when his UC Berkeley team developed its first RISC-I processor. That prototype contained a relatively small 44,000 transistors, and outperformed a more conventional CISC design with more than twice as many transistors. Flash forward to today, where RISC-V based SoCs like those based on SiFive core IP are fundamentally changing the semiconductor industry. Quite literally, we wouldn’t be doing the landmark work we’re conducting at SiFive without Dave’s contributions. Congratulations, Dave! Cheers!

Busy, Busy, Busy...

But we haven’t just been partying it up - we’ve been staying busy here, and there is no rest on the horizon! This spring is jam-packed with events - here are a few of the many places SiFive will be over the next few weeks.

Catch SiFive co-founder Yunsup Lee at Cool Chips in Yokohama, Japan, this week, where he’ll talk about how RISC-V is revolutionizing hardware. And on April 19, we’re a sponsor of the GSA Silicon Summit where SiFive CEO Naveed Sherwani will speak.

We’ve also scheduled the next SiFive TechTalk. Krste Asanovic plans to speak about the latest developments in using RISC-V for artificial intelligence at the April 25 event, which will be held at 282 Almaden Blvd in San Jose. Register to attend here!

A group of us will also participate in the TSMC 2018 Technology Symposium, which will take place the first few weeks in May and hit Santa Clara, Calif.; Austin, Texas; and Boston. You won’t want to miss out - register today!

Featured Developer

Our view of the world centers around the developer, the engineer, the user, the dreamer. It’s you who are contributing to RISC-V and open-source, making what we do at SiFive possible. Last month, we held our first Hackathon at the Embedded Linux Conference and we’d like to give a huge shout out to the winners: Hasan, Moritz, Trung and Matt!

Curious what these four had to accomplish for the big cash prize and HiFive Unleashed board? Here are the highlights:

• Hasan won the embedded contest by getting a USB sync packet to transfer between the HiFive1 and the host over HiFive1's GPIO pins.
• Matt won the JavaScript contest with his port of Spider Monkey to RISC-V; he then ran the Sun Spider benchmark on a HiFive Unleashed board.
• Moritz and Trung won the open contest with a port of OpenEmbedded to a HiFive Unleashed board.

Thanks to all who participated for your dedication to SiFive and the open-source RISC-V community. Can’t wait for the next hackathon!

Are you working on something interesting? We’d love to feature you next. Drop by and let us know what you are working on!

Forum Highlight
The SiFive Forums are buzzing! They are packed with valuable content that can answer your questions and curiosity surrounding RISC-V, development boards, IP evaluations and much more. Here’s a peek at some of the threads that caught our attention (and will now have yours, too!):

• Initial OTP programming of FE310 chips
• HiFive Unleashed Linux kernel port?
• Bare-metal anyone?

SiFive in the Press

Want to see who has been talking about SiFive recently? Let’s take a look!

SiFive gets $50.6M to help companies get their custom chip designs out the door by Matthew Lynley, TechCrunch

SiFive raises $50.6 million for licensable custom microprocessors by Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat

SiFive Raises $50.6 Million to Recreate Chip Prototyping by James Morra, Electronic Design

RISC-V Silicon Startup Raises $50.6 Million and Inks Western Digital Deal by Christine Hall, Data Center Knowledge

SiFive Preps RISC-V Cloud Service by Rick Merritt, EE Times

RISC-V leader gains $50 million in funding and Western Digital vows to build 1 billion chips by Eric Brown, LinuxGizmos.com

RISC-V in the News
We’re always keeping an eye on RISC-V; after all, our founders invented it! Check out the latest conversations around the RISC-V ISA:

RISC-V Stands To Gain In Changing, IoT-Driven Market by Daniel Golightly, Android Headlines

Fifty (or Sixty) Years of Processor Development…for This? By Steven Leibson, EE Journal

‘Computing’s Nobel Prize” Winners Paved The Way To Smartphone Chips by Klint Finley, WIRED

Computer Chip Visionaries Win Turing Award by Cade Metz, The New York Times

Big tech signs up for new open source rival to ARM by Nick Farrell, Fudzilla

Interview with Rick O'Connor of RISC-V Foundation by Peter Clarke, eeNews Europe

We would love to hear from you - reply to this email with any questions or inquiries and we will get right back to you!

Thanks for your continued support! 

Until next time, 

Jack Kang

We would love to hear from you - reply to this email with any questions or inquiries and we will get right back to you!