One benefit of having customers customize their own cores, is they can iterate their settings (on FPGA) in hours and test the result on their actual workload, not just guess how some semi-standard core might perform on their workload based on SPEC or CoreMark or something.
The announcement says the U87 with (Cray-like) vector processing will be available in H2 2020.(Also ARM SVE-like, but ARM hasn't shipped anything with it yet, and I think hasn't even announced anything with it? Fujitsu has, in a supercomputer) Meantime, the U84 has only scalar integer and FP, with nothing equivalent to NEON on ARM. That might or might not matter to you.
Mixing a reasonable number of cores (up to nine) in the automated SoC configuration tool was announced alongside the 7-series (dual issue in order) cores in October last year. That continues. If you want more cores than that some engineering time would be required to verify it.
While you can iterate pretty quickly on an FPGA, I'd still be worried that cutting down a chip to optimize for $/perf works until it doesn't. Something off the shelf would be pretty resilient to algorithm tweaks (ad absurdum you have an Intel chip which performs black magic to run almost anything you throw at it well).
It's pretty hard to overcome the economy of scale of just buying a mass produced chip that's twice what you need but ten times cheaper because they're made in batches of a million.
I should note that my skepticism is coming from a place of "I want this to be a thing". Using the web page to design a chip is an instance of "live in the future and build what's missing" if I've ever seen one.
This is not to beat commodity processor/controller silicon. If you are going to build a SoC for whatever reason (peripherals, integration, etc) -- you might as well make the integrated processing exactly what you want.
The announcement says the U87 with (Cray-like) vector processing will be available in H2 2020.(Also ARM SVE-like, but ARM hasn't shipped anything with it yet, and I think hasn't even announced anything with it? Fujitsu has, in a supercomputer) Meantime, the U84 has only scalar integer and FP, with nothing equivalent to NEON on ARM. That might or might not matter to you.
Mixing a reasonable number of cores (up to nine) in the automated SoC configuration tool was announced alongside the 7-series (dual issue in order) cores in October last year. That continues. If you want more cores than that some engineering time would be required to verify it.
https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive%2F5ec09861-351b-420c-b6...
Adding QuickLogic eFPGA to a SiFive core has been announced:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/quicklogic-teams-wi...