Sounds like they were basically a victim of venture capital. First the pressure to grow (too) rapidly, then the gutting for failure to deliver. Growing a company with wild ambitions sustainably is hard. I feel sorry for the employees that tried.
And of course 9 women can't deliver a baby in one month.
I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital. As far as I can see, there was no option other than to grow rapidly. They'd need to have matched Intel/Qualcomm/etc. to have any chance of success.
VC gave them money on the initial RISC-V hype but then the hyped died down. There was like a good year or two with no real affordable products on the market and the software/toolchains were all half-baked. It also became clear that an open instruction set doesn't really bring you any huge "win". As far as I can see, the necessary subsequent waves of VC with deeper pockets never materialized (like MagicLeap had managed)
The Chinese competitors were also very quick and managed to catch up and in essence beat them to market - so they've lost any first-mover advantage
> I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital.
I guess it makes sense from the investment angle. Ie. need to grow, and need to grow fast, therefore need for lots of cash, therefore need for risk takers.
But at the same time not so much so for the angle of is growth realistically possible for this type of company? It took ARM over 30 years to organically grow with ups and downs to what it is today, in an age where the foundry landscape was much less complex wand wild chip design innovations were much more common. (We had SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Alpha AXP, i960, 68k, Itanium, Transmeta in the nineties.)
From what I read, SiFive had broad ambitions and wasn't very focused. Not sure if it is viable, but expecting it to turn $$$ into competitive chip designs in a couple of years was a bit of a stretch.
You're absolutely right of course and I stand corrected.
I was thinking of the cool, companies (Silicon Graphics, Apple, NeXT, BeOS) and high end stuff (SUN, Hewlett Packard, DEC), of the pre-WinTel era. When CPUs had one core, integrated memory and periphery controllers and even floating point co-processors weren't ubiquitous and "graphics cards" did not include a "GPU".
Acorn worked with a single company (VLSI) to produce the first ARM chips. When ARM came of age, there wasn't a complex "foundry ecosystem" where dozens of companies specialize in different stages of what results in a SoC.
i feel like the complex foundry ecosystem makes wild stuff a lot more doable now
from my perspective i see a lot of totally wild stuff, not all of it successful: yosys, esp32, fram, reram, optane, tensilica, cortex-m0 socs, padauk's fppas, gigadevice, apple's m1 and m2, graviton, tpus, ambiq's subthreshold utter insanity, stm32g, the unbelievable explosion of photovoltaic, wch's ch32v003, gallium nitride, mram, wlcsps, jlcpcb's smd assembly service, mass-market lidar chips with picosecond timing, chalcogenide pram, greenarrays, silicon carbide, modern silicon mosfets (not to mention igbts), led streetlights, petabit interconnects in data centers, nvme ssds, the zillion variations of risc-v, bitcoin mining asics, oled displays (though those aren't chips), gpgpu, submillimeter phased-array mass-market products like starlink, indium phosphide amplifiers in oscilloscopes, amorphous-silicon-on-glass products from sharp hitting the mass market (look, ma, no cog!), and skywater's open-source pdk and the associated shuttle program
so i have a hard time agreeing that "wild chip design innovations were much more common" in the 01990s than now; from my perspective that could hardly be farther from the truth
And of course 9 women can't deliver a baby in one month.