Akeana has emerged from stealth to reveal a RISC-V family with production-ready RTL available now to license. Products range from 32-bit in-order cores to 64-bit, multithread out-of-order CPUs with vector processing. Akeana also offers complementary intellectual property (IP) such as a mesh interconnect and interrupt controllers. The designs are configurable and customizable. Customers can add proprietary instructions and also work with Akeana to modify a design to achieve power, performance, and area (PPA) targets for their specific workloads.
Three RISC-V Series Target the Broad Market
Offering general-purpose CPUs, Akeana targets a broad market. The auto industry, however, is a prime target, particularly as carmakers seek high-performance CPUs for advanced driver assistance and companies in Europe and China have shown interest in RISC-V. Akeana is also optimistic about mobile applications (e.g., smartphones and wearables), touting its cores’ potential to support Android. Android’s incomplete RISC-V readiness, however, must be resolved before smartphone application processors become commercially viable, and their success—were it to happen—would be a seismic upheaval for a market long married to Arm.
Multithreading Rides Again
Networking customers could emerge, drawn to Akeana CPU’s multithreading capability, which packet-processing software can use to hide long-latency operations (e.g., memory accesses) and increase throughput. If a 64-bit, out-of-order, multithread CPU for networking sounds familiar, much of the Akeana team hails from the Marvell group that developed the Arm-compatible ThunderX2 and ThunderX3 CPUs, which shared these characteristics.
(To trace the genealogy like an Old Testament prophet: Marvell obtained these CPUs by acquiring Cavium. Cavium had CPU teams, but the original ThunderX2 effort stumbled just as Avago took over Broadcom and sought to divest that company’s CPU group. Cavium picked them up and relabeled their Vulcan design ThunderX2. For its part, Broadcom obtained this group by acquiring NetLogic. That company got into the processor business by buying RMI, the reborn Raza Microelectronics, which developed the 64-bit, multithread, out-of-order MIPS-compatible XLP processor. Raza got into the business by picking up MIPS-processor startup SandCraft in the 1990s.)
A Few Competitors or a Few Too Many?
Many companies offer simple RISC-V cores, but only a few offer high-performance CPUs. SiFive claims that the P870 delivers about 19 points/GHz on SpecInt2006, an impressive score that Akeana expects to handily beat by achieving a stunning 25 points/GHz. Other licensors include Tenstorrent, which developed fast CPUs for its NPU chips, and Ventana. Backed by Cisco and others, Ventana is developing compute chiplets but will also license its server-class RISC-V core. It’s a lot of competition, especially considering how little evidence there is that licensors will defect from Arm.
Bottom Line
Companies looking to license a high-performance RISC-V core have a few suppliers to choose from. Akeana is only one of two, however, focused exclusively on IP, which should make it a stronger partner. Its design team has a long track record of producing silicon, which should assuage customers concerned about performance and compatibility when running real-world workloads. The big challenge Akeana faces isn’t specific to it but rather to the entire RISC-V community, which has achieved broad adoption at the low end but nothing yet at the high end. If RISC-V takes off there, Akeana is well positioned for leadership.