SiFive and Kinara Partner to Offer Bare Metal Access to RISC-V Vector Processors
SANTA CLARA, Calif. – SiFive, Inc., the gold standard for RISC-V computing, today announced that the company has partnered with Kinara to create a USB-based enablement board that provides access to the SiFive IntelligenceTM X280 processor and sample code to allow customers to test out the X280 IP and begin development of RISC-V vector software. The Xara device will be available to select customers in late Q2 of this year.
At the core of the HiFiveTM Xara X280 enablement board is Kinara’s Ara-2, which incorporates two SiFive X280 64-bit RISC-V cores. These cores handle pre- and post-processing tasks, tensor filtering, floating-point functions, and more. Additionally, these SiFive X280 cores connect to high-performance, high-efficiency Kinara NPU cores that are optimized for AI inference at the edge with up to 40 TOPS of performance and include support for generative AI workloads like transformer-based models (e.g., LLaVA, LLaMA, and other Large Language Models (LLMs)).
“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,” said Ravi Annavajjhala, CEO of Kinara. “Together with SiFive, the combined solution is capable of supporting a range of AI workloads, from traditional CNNs 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,” said Jack Kang, SVP, WW Business Development, Sales, and Customer Experience. “The expanded ability to access Kinara’s Ara-2 processor means developers can also explore the latest in edge AI processing capabilities.”
About Kinara
Kinara, Inc. is a leader in Edge AI technology, providing powerful and efficient AI processing solutions for a wide range of applications, from industrial automation to smart cities. On February 10, 2025, NXP announced it entered into an agreement to acquire Edge AI pioneer Kinara.
About SiFive
As the pioneers who introduced RISC-V to the world, SiFive is transforming the future of compute by bringing the limitless potential of RISC-V to the highest performance and most data-intensive applications in the world. SiFive’s unrivaled compute platforms have enabled leading technology companies around the world to innovate, optimize and deliver the most advanced solutions of tomorrow across every market segment of chip design, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, data center, mobile, and consumer. With SiFive, the future of RISC-V has no limits.
