Last year, Intel announced the development of the Horse Creek platform, in partnership with SiFive to develop a new high-performance RISC-V development system as part of the company's Intel Foundry Services (IFS) and strive to promote the adoption of RISC-V. These development boards are said to be a continuation of SiFive’s own HiFive development boards, aiming to develop the RISC-V ecosystem and accelerate prototype development.
Earlier this year, Intel also announced the IFS Accelerator Ecosystem Alliance, aiming to help accelerate chip prototype development and disassembly through in-depth collaboration with various semiconductor partners in EDA, IP and design services. IFS accelerator is a comprehensive set of tools including silicon-proven Intel process-specific optimized IP combinations (from standard cell libraries, memory, GP I/O, analog and I/F IP). Strategically speaking, a huge and vibrant ecosystem will be extremely important to the success of Intel's foundry strategy, and the IFS accelerator is one of the links. The company initially launched accelerator in September 2021 to assist the automotive industry in transitioning to more advanced nodes, however, it has since expanded its efforts to other areas.
It is worth noting that SiFive is a member of the IFS accelerator, which says, "SiFive will enable IFS customers to create computing platforms featuring RISC-V to optimize for their market applications. Intel's extensive IP portfolio is complementary to SiFive's performance-driven processor IP portfolio, such as SiFive Intelligence and SiFive Performance family processor IPs."
At the recent Intel Innovation 2022 Developers Conference, the company publicly demonstrated Horse Creek for the first time. Horse Creek is a RISC-V software development board inspired by a Raspberry Pi. Due to the large number of integrated interfaces, it is physically larger and has much higher performance, such as the onboard 8GB DDR5, PCIe 5.0 slot, SPI flash includes U-Boot, and countless other monitoring and debugging interfaces.
In 18 months, Horse Creek changed from a text announcement to an A0 stepper chip that can run Linux in full. Made from the company's state-of-the-art Intel 4 Process process, the chip measures just 4mm x 4mm and is packaged in a 19mm x 19mm BGA package. The chip is also intended to demonstrate the interoperability of third-party controllers and IPs with Intel's own hard IP PHYs. Therefore, the SoC itself integrates many advanced interfaces.
The SoC itself integrates the quad-core SiFive P550 RISC-V core. Each core has its own L1 and L2 cache and has a shared last-level cache -- all running at 2.2GHz.
The SoC integrates Intel's own PCIe 5.0 PHY with Synopsys PCIe 5 controllers with x8 channels. It also integrates Intel's DDR5 PHY, supports 5600MT/s rate, and Cadence's memory controller . There are also Intel 4 IPs that include 2 MB of shared SRAM (part of the memory compiler), process monitor, cache, power/clock/PLL, electronic fuse, JTAG and various unit libraries.
Horse Creek can successfully start Linux during the demonstration, and Intel even demonstrated using this chip to execute games (because there is no GPU, the drawing is performed on the CPU) and various other applications (media players, playbacks, browsers, etc.).
About a month ago, Intel also announced Intel Pathfinder for RISC-V, a rapid prototype development environment for , , for system integrator . Essentially, it is a suite of IP, middleware, open source and third-party tools, and operating system support designed to simplify the exploration of pre-silicon designs based on RISC-V. Intel said it is working with commercial and open source RISC-V IP vendors to provide a consistent environment for software development for different RISC-V-based processors. In terms of business, RISC-V core IP includes Andes, Codasip, SiFive, MIPS and other companies' IPs. Pathfinder includes some FPGA platforms for RISC-V chip simulation. The starter version utilizes Intel Pathfinder’s Terasic development kit, while commercial tools include Stratix 10 GX-based boards for full chip simulation capabilities.
The launch date of the new Horse Creek development board has not been announced yet.
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