I am a little surprised to see this. I'd imagine NASA would chose a CPU with an already proven track record (especially for something so wide ranging, the press release says it expected to be used for 'virtually every future space mission, from planetary exploration to lunar and Mars surface missions'. This is a new design from SiFive and there's not a huge amount of SiFive IP around yet to demonstrate how good (or otherwise) their verification is. Running into a hardware bug whilst your CPU is in space is not good.
Still good SiFive have convinced NASA otherwise, they must have a pretty strong verification story behind the scenes.
Still good SiFive have convinced NASA otherwise, they must have a pretty strong verification story behind the scenes.