SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Development Board Update

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Development Board Update

Earlier this year SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board with plans for shipping in July. That timeframe for shipping since passed but SiFive today issued a new update on their RISC-V development board...

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

[arcivanov]

I know what "mini-DTX" is. What is "micro-DTX"?

[Quackdoc]

A quick overview of the more interesting/useful to know board/soc features

the GPU is AXM-8-256, supported OOB and is getting software updates
Support HEVC (H.265) and AVC (H.264) encoding and decoding
H.265 up to 8K@50fps or 32-channel 1080P@30fps video decoding
H.265 up to 8K@25fps or 13-channel 1080P@30fps video encoding
19.95 TOPS in INT8, 9.975 TOPS in INT16, and 9.975 FTOPS in FP16
dual gigabit internet, one with with remote board management
1x Gen 3 x4
Jtag header
1 USB Type-C (USB2 only) connector for debug UART/JTAG support through FT4232H
TF card
Mini ITX compliant
40pin GPIO header

[anarki2]

The worst thing about non-X86 systems - it doesn't just work, everything from installer media via bootloader through the various OS quirks take extra effort because there's just no standards in place.

[rmfx]

Look what a useful punk you are.
I'm too lazy to lookup what OOB is, it rings my bell, but I forgot. And, I'm too lazy. So, pretty please, can you decipher the acronym?
Video codecs - boring, they don't matter, at least for me. Waste of die space.
TOPS - mediocre, but I'm not much into the AI hype anyways.
the GPU is AXM-8-256 - have to look it up. Does it have 0.5 TFlops FP32? That's the minimum for me.
Alternatively, if I can plug in a GPU over PCIe, then that would be even better.

You didn't specify the vector unit, you lazy bastard punk... the most interesting part... does it have the vector unit, or not?

Wow, can you be more of a toxic ass*ole than that or we reached the bottom of humanity here ?

[uid313]

Only 4 cores, not 8 cores. Only very slow 1.4 GHz cores.

This only have Gigabit Ethernet, nowadays many board have 2.5 Gbit Ethernet.
Only have HDMI, not DisplayPort, and it is old HDMI 2.0 not 2.1b.
Only have H.264 and H.265, not AV1.
Only have USB 3.2 Gen 1, not Gen 2 or USB4 or Thunderbolt.
Doesn't have Wi-Fi, NFC, Bluetooth or M.2 (for SSD).

[ikoz]

The worst thing about non-X86 systems - it doesn't just work, everything from installer media via bootloader through the various OS quirks take extra effort because there's just no standards in place.

Unlike ARM, RISC-V is open-source and more standardized. AMD PCIe GPUs work out of the box, no driver installation or hassle. (NVIDIA decided to not port their drivers, probably afraid of the future competition with ARM, which they use for their Grace CPU). Installing Linux is super easy, just flash the image to the SD. There is the UEFI equivalent u-boot, you can literally replace Debian's rootfs with Ubuntu's, and it will work fine as long as the boot partition has u-boot. The device trees are not too bad as there are no blobs.

It is great for research as any university student can modify the chip and add anything, e.g., a SIMD processor. ARM dev boards cost way too much to be anything useful for developers.

[ikoz]

the meaning of running code on many GPU threads simply disappears.

Do you know how a GPU works? All GPU cores run the same instruction, if one core had to branch all other cores have to wait.
Imagine running a kernel on it, impossible! It is only meant to do math on arrays, which is exactly what it is used for.

[kvuj]

No RVA23

They seem to be going for very premium dev boards, so I find it weird that they aren't using their own P870 cores. Does anyone know anything that uses them? I get that they had to pick an off the shelf SOC and those P550 are the best they could find, but I find it sad that they aren't pushing the best of the best at the kind of price they're asking.

Also I'm fairly certain their claim about the fastest dev board for RISC-V being false. Milk-V has some boards with an absurd amount of cores...

[ayumu]

You didn't specify the vector unit, you lazy bastard punk... the most interesting part... does it have the vector unit, or not?

No vector unit on P550.

MILK-V Jupiter is much more interesting despite slower, as that one implements RVA22 and RVV 1.0.

This SiFive board had suffered from many delays, thus why it is somewhat unexciting. P550 are faster than already available development boards, but otherwise it is quite boring.

In any event, they should be very helpful to distributions for running builds. Much faster than the U74 they are majorly using today.