SiFive's RISC-V HiFive Unmatched Upgraded To Ship With 16GB Of RAM

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I imagine having the performance of a Raspberry Pi 3 or so is the bigger deal killer than a mere 8 GB of RAM. Though I second the call for SO-DIMM slots, which would be nice to have for more ARM systems.

The memory actually seems like the biggest deal, for native building ports of things you can spare time until you have to swap to link your binaries. 16GiB of RAM is enough to link most sane things even with a less efficient linker.

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They also have branch prediction and other fancy stuff. But thats not the point with such a small series silicon by a tiny company.

This SoC has branch prediction though, and it's OoO AFAIK.

[jaxa]

I imagine having the performance of a Raspberry Pi 3 or so is the bigger deal killer than a mere 8 GB of RAM. Though I second the call for SO-DIMM slots, which would be nice to have for more ARM systems.

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I wonder if it supports UEFI? Product Brief only says U-SDK "OpenSBI / U-Boot / Linux Kernel", and E-SDK (bare metal). If it requires device tree files, then I hate it already.

I mean, supporting UEFI on it shouldn't be that hard. RISC-V UEFI firmwares have been around for a while now and the generic ones aren't that far from the product-specific ones on a relatively simple device like this.

Device trees don't have to be files either, there is a binary representation that can just be left in memory by the loader/base firmware.

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Wow, that makes a world of difference, especially in making it useful for native buildservers for projects like OpenBSD.

[PublicNuisance]

This works out well for me. I won't be able to order one until March anyway so the delay doesn't hurt me at all and the 8GB of extra RAM is fantastic.

4 cores is very little. All the modern ARM boards have 8 cores.

They also aren't open source and blob free. While I would love to have 8 cores over 4 for me being open source/blob free is a bigger priority.

[cb88]

. If it requires device tree files, then I hate it already.

Catch-22 ... since things like ACPI on x86 require massive amount of quirks patches since they are almost always wrong. It's very pointless to burn that data into the board if you are just going to get it wrong.

[Alexmitter]

4 cores is very little. All the modern ARM boards have 8 cores.

They also have branch prediction and other fancy stuff. But thats not the point with such a small series silicon by a tiny company.

[uid313]

4 cores is very little. All the modern ARM boards have 8 cores.

[Alexmitter]

I hope that means the unit I preordered half a month ago on mouser will also come with 16GB.