SiFive Partners with Kinara to Put Two RISC-V Cores and 40 TOPS of Ara-2 Compute on a USB Stick

RISC-V pioneer SiFive has announced a partnership with energy-efficient edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) specialist Kinara to launch a USB gadget designed to provide developers with access to RISC-V cores and the Ara-2 neural coprocessor without needing a dedicated RISC-V development machine: the HiFive Xara X280.

"SiFive's RISC-V cores are a perfect complement to Kinara's neural processor cores enabling performance- and cost-optimized end to end inference for edge AI use cases," claims Kinara chief executive officer Ravi Annavajjhala of the partnership. "Together with SiFive, the combined solution is capable of supporting a range of AI workloads, from traditional CNNs [Convolutional Neural Networks] to advanced generative AI and multi-modal vision transformers."

"We designed the Xara board with the intention of allowing SiFive customers to evaluate the real-time behavior of the X280 IP before integrating it into their own custom chips," adds SiFive's said Jack Kang. "The expanded ability to access Kinara's Ara-2 processor means developers can also explore the latest in edge AI processing capabilities."

The HiFive Xara X280 is, effectively, a single-board computer built around Kinara's Ara-2 system-on-chip, which includes two 64-bit SiFive X280 RISC-V cores and Kinara's own neural processing cores — delivering a claimed 40 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of compute at minimum precision. Rather than being used as a standalone device, however, the Xara X280 connects to a host computer via USB, making it possible to do bare-metal development without a dedicated RISC-V machine.

The HiFive Xara X280 is due to launch to unnamed "select customers" towards the end of the second quarter this year, SiFive has confirmed; pricing has not yet been publicly disclosed.