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RISC-V SiFive Freedom Unleahsed 540 SoC / HiFive Unleashed Board Added To Coreboot

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  • #21
    Originally posted by Danielsan View Post
    No one serious hacker will buy one of those boards a that price since the moment you can emulate (I guess) this processor and many of the other feature that the board provides. Because the price I believe the targets are Universities and other Research Institutes.
    Devboards are for companies, this thing will be sold to companies that want to get a head start into the Risc-V device manufacturing.

    For a devboard isn't particularly expensive, I've seen devboards of Marvell high end SoCs sold to companies for more than 2k dollars.

    If the engineers working on this thing cost you 3k per month each, you don't really feel bad about the cost of this thing.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
      Small production runs on both the board AND the SoC, as simple as that.

      Even a piece of shit Allwinner-based raspi clone would cost like that if it was produced in very low volumes.

      Price will go down if this is mass-produced properly at normal scales.
      Oh ok, looking forward to getting my hands on one in a few years time then?

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      • #23
        Originally posted by polarathene View Post
        Oh ok, looking forward to getting my hands on one in a few years time then?
        Yeah, it has a normal price for a decent commercial devboard with midrange ARM SoCs on it.
        If RISC-V is successful and SoC designs using these CPUs are seriously mass-produced like for ARM, then prices should fall down as with ARM designs.

        Besides, as others have pointed out, these things aren't even fully supported by Linux, many things may or may not compile at all for them. This is way too soon to get one of these boards unless you are a hardcore developer (or you're paid to work on it).
        Last edited by starshipeleven; 27 April 2018, 04:16 AM.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by tg-- View Post
          I'm actually amazed how fast they managed to come to market.
          Props to SiFive to start out with Coreboot from the get-go; this is a great sign that they intend to stick to their open source promises and already makes their systems more desirable than many ARM SoC producers (who gradually have moved away from providing u-boot support and more and more shipping closed source (stage 1) bootloaders).
          Not knowing a lot about coreboot, I am curious why you say this. Are you saying that you're happy they're using an OSS bootloader or coreboot specifically--instead of u-boot which I would have expected as it's used by all the other non-x86 SoCs.

          I'm not criticizing the choice, I'm just curious what the logic behind it is. Both coreboot and u-boot are great projects and I support them both.

          It's good to see that they went with something OSS instead of closed, but this is for an very open IP processor, I guess I would have been surprised if they didn't go OSS. So, while I am glad they went OSS, I'm also expeced it. Was that unjustifiably optimistic of me?

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          • #25
            Originally posted by Ray54 View Post
            I am not familiar with the SiFive board, but what is the management core for? I think I read that CoreBoot is a small linux process that boots the main OS and then exits, so can that not run on one of the main cores? I would not really want a management core being always active, like it is with Intel and AMD, as it seems like a recipe for security holes, or am I misunderstanding the design?
            It could do the same kind of things that management cores do on Rpi, Allwinner, Amlogic SoCs and do thermal management, clock speed setting, voltage control, power management, etc. It's not necessarily there to spy on you.

            BTW, those three SoC families use (in order) VideoCore IV, OpenRISC, and Cortex-M as their management cores.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by dungeon View Post
              If only Freedom GPU is there too
              Is there such a thing?

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              • #27
                Originally posted by AndyChow View Post
                Basically, there doesn't exist a distribution that can run on this, and most software won't compile out of the repo.
                Quite a few distros already have ports.
                Contribute to riscvarchive/riscv-wiki development by creating an account on GitHub.


                70% of debian already builds... so you're pretty much completely wrong.



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                • #28
                  Originally posted by willmore View Post
                  Is there such a thing?
                  Yes, internally in companies together with recipe for Coca Cola

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                  • #29
                    I actually asked in the forum about Raspberry PI3 like RISCV board a couple of months ago and the answer is: it's too early. So I'm pretty sure it's going to come eventually, especially if it gets picked up by more manufacturers that can mass produce the chips and eventually bring down the cost.

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                    • #30
                      Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
                      More like "serial or TTL or JTAG into this".
                      Actually, I read the doc, and you can SSH into this. I was surprised also. I was expecting UART.

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