Leaving aside the insensitivity of this post towards laid-off staff - which is bad enough - it doesn't actually tell current / prospective customers what has changed about SiFive's business and products.<p>Clearly something has, but this provides no real clues. Completely counterproductive. But all is good as SiFive will revolutionize computing in ways we have not yet begun to imagine!
Layoffs aside, it's hard as an enthusiast consumer to get excited about RISC-V for the same reason it's hard to get excitrd about ARM. Availability is limited to prepackaged SBCs and tinkering-discouraged consumer products.<p>I'd be so excited if I could buy a chip and a motherboard and just drop them into a standard ATX case. But I don't think there exists a consumer-purchaseable RISC-V or ARM chip that isn't a whole system on a chip.
This letter could easily have been written by GPT3, so I certainly hope the person who would be writing it was one of the people laid off.<p>Somehow I doubt it though.
I still haven't yet figured out if anyone is <i>actually</i> switching any big platforms to RISC-V, or if everyone is just pretending to switch so they can get a free ARM license from ARM (which it seems you only get if you show a prototype of your stuff working on RISC-V and a few blog posts about how RISC-V is the future).
Not sure who is that Patrick guy, but that is a horrible long piece of junk with literally no info in it. Other than the mention of AI, there is nothing concrete.<p>I don't know what is the motive, but clearly that Patrick guy is creating doubts and he seems to be pretty good at that. Maybe just another big mouth who wasted way too much time in some fancy corporate PR department?
Maybe I'm not the intended audience, maybe I'm not from a culture that understands posts like this, but this all seems so hollow and tone-deaf.<p>If I didn't otherwise know about the lay-offs it would to me paint an entirely misleading picture, it only hints at redundancies with euphemisms:<p>> need to realign our operations<p>> a need to refocus our priorities<p>> The resulting restructuring<p>And that's it, no other mention, not even an oblique one.<p>And yet the article is full of things like:<p>> SiFive today is in tremendous shape<p>> SiFive’s growth has never been stronger<p>It just comes across as complete bullshit? There's no sense of communicating difficulties, or any sense of humility. Just a lot of "Hoo hah aren't we amazing!".
This is what GPT-4 produced when asked to remove the bullshit:<p>SiFive Update - October 26, 2023<p>After years of growth, SiFive has reassessed its strategies and operations to focus on the most promising opportunities, leading to a restructuring. We believe this change is essential for our continued growth and industry leadership.<p>We are financially stable and continue to secure revenues and royalties from leading semiconductor companies. We are focused on maintaining our technological edge with investments in advanced R&D.<p>We recently launched the SiFive Performance P870 and SiFive Intelligence X390 products. Our commitment to our four product families: Essential, Intelligence, Performance, and Automotive remains strong, targeting sectors such as AI, ADAS, Electric Vehicles, Wearables, and Mobile.<p>With the increasing industry emphasis on AI and the need for adaptability in product design, SiFive aims to offer products that cater to these evolving needs.<p>SiFive has restructured to increase our agility, strengthen partnerships, and maintain our leadership in the RISC-V domain.<p>Regards,<p>Patrick
Layoffs followed by a round of hiring mean that a company thinks its engineers are making too much money and can be replaced by cheaper hires with the same level of skill.<p>This is one of many reasons why investment capitalism is a really poor method of technological development - a better option would be to reduce the control of external investors and adopt a more democratic internal hiring and promotion policy. Unfortunately four decades of neoliberal government and corporate policy has concentrated all the capital in a few hands, and the outsourcing of much of the hardware manufacturing base overseas has resulted in a decrepit technological base.<p>Thus, I imagine Chinese development of RISC-V is well ahead of whatever SiFive is up to and if they were directly competing, they'd be well behind the curve:<p><a href="https://techwireasia.com/2023/10/do-risc-v-restrictions-signal-the-failure-of-the-us-export-controls-on-china/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://techwireasia.com/2023/10/do-risc-v-restrictions-sign...</a>
><i>SiFive today is in tremendous shape. [...] We are very well funded for years to come</i><p>Ah, so they did it for more money, not to save the company. Good to know. I feel they could have written a few more hollow words to their ex-coworkers though
Every person you hire to help drive a period of growth is someone who will later be fired once that growth (or commonly just funding) runs out. It's very easy to just increase headcount to increase growth but it's not sustainable.<p>I feel like companies often think they're always going up an exponential curve rather than breaching the top of the 'S' and you really need to plan for the long term health of your company. This company obviously hasn't
I would still love to hear SiFive say what business they're in. From the context they're licensing cores, but making a SoC from those cores is still up to the customer. Still... would be nice to get that confirmed by the company themselves.
"We're doing great! Loads of money and everything is wonderful! Some of you are asking why we fired loads of people and that was a hard decision to make. Everything is getting even better from here!".<p>So... it seems the effect of the post is to further piss off the departed and give the general impression the CEO is incompetent.<p>Any guesses what they <i>wanted</i> to achieve with this piece of marketing?
vanguard and blackrock do prefer to keep only their big tech? (apple/msft/google/etc)<p>Or they did come up with the realization that this Big Tech is toxic for humanity and do invest in stuff in attempt to clean up the mess, for instance trying to make RISC-V a success, that on the worldwide non-free modern ISA issue?