Note that this is only one of two new lines of chips announced by Microchip under the "PIC64" name.<p>PIC was of course originally a proprietary 8 bit ISA designed for use in intelligent but low cost peripherals in the 1970s. PIC32 was a line of MIPS-based chips, but a couple of years ago they added 32 bit Arm Cortex-M cores to the line-up.<p>This radiation tolerant chip uses eight quite new SiFive X280 RISC-V cores (announced April 2021) which are dual-issue in-order with large 512 bit vector unit.<p>The other is the PIC64GX series, which uses four SiFive U54 64 bit single-issue Linux-capable RV64GC cores plus one E51 64 bit RV64IMAC real-time/controller core, all running at 625 MHz. There is no vector capability.<p>Perhaps the best way to think of this chip is as a PolarFire SoC FPGA without the FPGA :-) They are advertised as being pin-compatible.<p><a href="https://static.dev.sifive.com/U54-MC-RVCoreIP.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://static.dev.sifive.com/U54-MC-RVCoreIP.pdf</a><p>These seem to be close to shipping, but you can't order just yet.<p><a href="https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64gx" rel="nofollow">https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...</a><p><a href="https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/CURIOSITY-PIC64GX1000-KIT-ES" rel="nofollow">https://www.microchip.com/en-us/development-tool/CURIOSITY-P...</a>