SiFive HiFive Premier P550 Announced As New RISC-V Developer Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SiFive HiFive Premier P550 Announced As New RISC-V Developer Board

Since SiFive ceased production of the HiFive Unleashed developer board we've been clamoring for a new and more powerful RISC-V developer board... Today SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 as a new developer system offering that will be available this summer...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SiFive-HiFive-Premier-P550

[bachchain]

Why does the PCIe slot have a tiny cover over the middle?

[numacross]

Why does the PCIe slot have a tiny cover over the middle?

Most likely it's x4 electrically, but x16 physically. The linked site specifies x16, but the press release contradicts it:

[...]
root complex PCI Express Gen 3 x4
[...]
High speed interconnects with PCI Express Gen3 x4 via a PCIe x16 slot
[...]

I guess when the datasheet gets published it'll be clear.

[Alexmitter]

Why does the PCIe slot have a tiny cover over the middle?

Super simple answer, that is for the pick and place machine. Those work with suction and this is a place for it to suck on to pick the component and place it. Smaller connectors often have a small piece of capton tape instead.

[Alexmitter]

I wonder if that Computer on Module board is Smarc compliant, because it uses the same connectior and form factor.

[Times Two]

30% faster than ARM A75, so at A76 level at best and therefore no better than Raspberry Pi 5 and with 4 cores definitely well below (long in the tooth) RK3588 based 4x A76 + 4x A55 SBCs.

In my recollection the most recent phoronix test of SiFive offerings produced abysmal results. So, while I can definitely envision use cases for the P550, I can't help thinking: SiFive needs to step things up.

[Anux]

Hopefully they make boards with at least one full PCIe4 x16 slot, one PCIe4 x4 M.2 (2280) and 2 changeable DDR5 RAM slots, until then I wont ever touch this platform.
I know it's a dev board.

[LockedPotato]

If it's $500 or less literally just take my money.

[microcode]

I know it's not easy taping stuff out, but it's not easy to be all that excited for ‘announcing’ a board with a modest four of their second fastest cores; especially when their fastest cores aren't competitive either (even within just the RISC-V ecosystem). Ventana has this problem too, where it seems nobody has actually seen any running system with their cores and talked about it... and yet they've done two paper launches, the second one referenced to the first.

Please somebody find a middle ground between vaporware and completely uncompetitive demo hardware.

P.S. I appreciate the SiFive boards, and have bought several of them and used them to validate and develop RISC-V ports of software. I especially appreciate anything in a standard form factor that works with PC parts.

[uid313]

If it's $500 or less literally just take my money.

Just get a Raspberry Pi 5 instead which is much, much, much cheaper and probably faster too.

This thing doesn't got GPU, audio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, M.2 slot, SATA, or anything.