RISC-V chip designer SiFive has laid off many of its engineers and other staff amid efforts to refocus on creating bespoke processor cores for customers, according to reports.

The fabless processor outfit is said to have chopped about 20 percent of its staff as part of a move to re-align its business. This appears to mean discontinuing its portfolio of ready-made RISC-V core designs and focusing on operating entirely as a design shop for customers with specific requirements.

SiFive’s woes were first reported by semiconductor industry analyst Ian Cutress on his blog, with Cutress saying most of the company’s engineering team had been discharged, along with the sales and product team. Most of the management team are also said to be gone, leaving CEO Patrick Little and the three co-founders.

SiFive was not immediately available to confirm the details, but in a statement sent to Cutress, a spokesperson said it was "realigning across all of our teams and geographies to better take advantage of the opportunities ahead, reduce operational complexities and increase our ability to respond quickly to customer product requirements."

The company said it "continues to be excited about the momentum and long-term outlook for our business and RISC-V."

This move has come out of the blue from SiFive, which only this month announced its latest RISC-V products in the shape of the Performance P870, a 64-bit out-of-order superscalar core design, and the Intelligence X390, a processor with vector processing extensions for accelerating workloads such as machine learning.

SiFive is one of the most prominent companies in the RISC-V ecosystem, winning a $50 million contract last year to develop a processor for NASA's High-Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC), and also seeing its Intelligence X280 cores used in chips for AI workloads in Google datacenters.

As Reg readers know, RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture that is available royalty-free for anyone to design a processor around. This has made it popular in places such as China, which is aiming to develop home-grown technology that is not dependent on intellectual property owned by US or European companies. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2023/10/25/riscv_champ_sifive_said_to/