SiFive to fuse RISC-V with Nvidia’s NVLink

RISC-V champion SiFive has joined a growing number of chip companies by throwing its weight behind Nvidia’s proprietary NVLink Fusion interconnect tech, a move that casts doubt on the viability of rival interconnect tech UALink.

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.

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…