RISC-V business: SiFive and CEVA join forces to enable the development AI-amenable, edge-oriented processors

On Tuesday, RISC-V CPU fixer SiFive announced it's working with CEVA, which licenses technology for deep learning, audio, and computer vision, to simplify the creation of processors capable of handling machine learning code without demanding too much power. RISC-V is an open, royalty-free instruction set architecture, unlike Intel's x86 chip architecture which requires a license to implement recent processor designs. SiFive provides clients with access to the necessary intellectual property licenses to create custom silicon with minimal negotiation and hassle. CEVA does much the same in a more specific set of domains. SiFive and CEVA anticipate that making it easy to design low-power SoCs tuned for AI-oriented tasks will attract hardware vendors looking to sell RISC-based hardware for applications demanding on-device neural networks, like imaging, computer vision, speech recognition, and sensor data handling.