Ubuntu Announces Official Support For The PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit RISC-V Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Announces Official Support For The PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit RISC-V Board

Following work bringing Ubuntu Linux to the RISC-V boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, LicheeRV, Nezha, and others, Canonical today announced they have published an optimized RISC-V image for the Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA powered "Icicle Kit" development board...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Icicle-Kit-Optimized

[slalomsk8er]

Just add a PCIe card with 8 Ports and slap a metal box around it and it would look like any other switch/router.

Not sure if the price is low or high for a network device dev kit.

[Velocity]

2 gigs of RAM, PCIe 2.0 no graphics and superslow cpu cores, all for $600 ! Grab it now while it's hot!

LOL i got my RK3588 16GB board for little over $100 (OrangePi 5). Development platform with 2Gigs of RAM? Even the 16GiB RAM Unleashed version is too low for a real development platform capable of functioning as a compile box, for example. For x86_64 i find that 32G of RAM is too low for some compilations, such as VLC, virtualbox and firefox. So 64GiB RAM required on a modern compilebox. The arm64 stuff i have to use SSDs as swap device, mehh.

If it is gonna cost 600 dollars, why not make it 650 or 700 so it at least have specs to be a useful device? Who is going to spend 600 dollars for 2 gigs of RAM? That sounds more like a future $6 device.

[hyperchaotic]

Jeebus folks, this board is not for home enthusiasts... It's an evaluation/dev board for companies starting on RISC V products, typically for embedded purposes. This price is nothing. The Intel XScale board I once worked on for the same purpose cost ~$10,000 and my company bought 50 of them.

[Barnacle]

Jeebus folks, this board is not for home enthusiasts... It's an evaluation/dev board for companies starting on RISC V products, typically for embedded purposes. This price is nothing. The Intel XScale board I once worked on for the same purpose cost ~$10,000 and my company bought 50 of them.

Right. When you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Or when you are a gamer, everything is required to run Crysis at 120FPS.

[osw89]

Jeebus folks, this board is not for home enthusiasts... It's an evaluation/dev board for companies starting on RISC V products, typically for embedded purposes. This price is nothing. The Intel XScale board I once worked on for the same purpose cost ~$10,000 and my company bought 50 of them.

Exactly and this isn't just a regular RISV Evaluation board, the SoC on this board is basically an FPGA with some RISCV cores, just like the Zynq chips from Xilinx except those use ARM. Comparing these chips to what you would get on ARM SBCs makes little sense. Also even low end Zynq boards still cost $100+ and they introduced the zynq 7000 chips back in 2011, a three figure price isn't that outrageous for a new chip considering higher end FPGA dev boards can easily cost over $10000 .