With SiFive, We Can Change the World – SiFive, Hacker News

A Note from Chris Lattner, New SVP of Platform Engineering

My quest is to build beautiful things that help change the world, and I’ve been fortunate to spend the last 15 years in Silicon Valley, working with some of the major players shaping all sorts of technology. Today, I’m super excited to join SiFive – the company I believe is best positioned to transforms the silicon industry, to lead the Platform Engineering team. With experience building and leading large-scale production systems that power our industry, I’m looking forward to making the dream of customized chips a reality with SiFive’s amazing team of engineers.

The end of Moore’s Law is a profound time, leading to new accelerators, new demand for custom ASICs, and new opportunities – and I believe that it is time for the semiconductor industry to change its approach to innovation. This industry has been defined by proprietary technologies that are difficult to use, don’t interoperate well, and have poor user experience. I believe that open tooling, world class engineering, and a focus on end-to-end user experience can transform the industry. Similarly, the RISC-V architecture pro-vides unique opportunities for SoC customization at every level. This is only possible with SiFive’s ambi-tious design methodology, which is unmatched in the industry.

My background includes experience creating and leading a number of large-scale technologies, including compiler technologies like the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure project, the Clang C and C compiler, the MLIR machine learning infrastructure, and others. I also spearheaded the creation of Swift – a program-ming language that powers Apple’s ecosystem – and led a team at Tesla that applies a wide range of tech in the autonomous driving space. Most recently, I built and managed an array of AI-related compiler, runtime, and programing language teams for Google Brain and TensorFlow.

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I’m extremely thankful for the opportunities I’ve had in my career, but I’m even more excited to join the ambitious and world class team at SiFive, who are tackling an even bigger project: making custom silicon more accessible through SiFive’s design platform. SiFive’s vertically integrated, idea-to-silicon team is an incredible one-stop-shop, making it possible to develop end-market hardware faster and more affordableably than ever before.

Faster, better, and cheaper custom SoC development will make it more accessible, and will allow people everywhere to accomplish technological breakthroughs that couldn’t happen anywhere else. Let’s change the world together!

Chris