SiFive to fuse RISC-V with Nvidia's NVLink

"NVLink enables Nvidia's customers to abstract a rack full of CPUs and GPUs as a single unified accelerator. The tech offers up to 3.6 TB/s of chip-to-chip bandwidth. Until recently, Nvidia kept NVLink to itself. However, with the introduction of NVLink Fusion last year, Nvidia extended support for the interconnect tech to the broader ecosystem. Since then, everyone from Intel, Arm, Fujitsu, and Qualcomm have thrown their weight behind the technology. Intel even plans to release client systems that use NVLink fusion to connect its CPU chiplets to Nvidia's GPU dies."

""The adoption of NVLink Fusion reflects a broader industry shift toward heterogeneous, co-designed systems where open CPU architectures and advanced interconnects work together to define the future of AI data center computing," SiFive CEO Patrick Little said in a statement. Officially, Nvidia supports two NVLink Fusion configs. The first combines partner CPUs with Nvidia's GPUs, while the second allows customers to combine Nvidia's Grace or Vera CPUs with their own custom XPUs or AI accelerators."

"SiFive designs CPU cores and processors based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) for use in a variety of applications ranging from the edge to the datacenter. The company licenses its designs to customers, who can use them in their own silicon, an arrangement similar to Arm's business model. With today's announcement, SiFive's designs will now include support for NVLink. As for SiFive, the startup is focusing its attention on enabling its customers to build custom CPUs that use its cores, plus SoC reference designs for integration with Nvidia's CPUs."

SiFive has added support for Nvidia's NVLink Fusion in its RISC-V based CPU cores and processor designs. NVLink Fusion enables abstraction of racks of CPUs and GPUs into a single unified accelerator and offers up to 3.6 TB/s of chip-to-chip bandwidth. Multiple major vendors including Intel, Arm, Fujitsu, and Qualcomm have adopted NVLink Fusion, and Intel plans client systems that link CPU chiplets to Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia supports two NVLink Fusion configurations for partner CPU+GPU combinations or Grace/Vera CPUs paired with custom XPUs or AI accelerators. SiFive will supply SoC reference designs and help customers build custom CPUs that integrate with Nvidia's CPUs.

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