SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Price Lowered, Ubuntu 24.04 Support Ready

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Price Lowered, Ubuntu 24.04 Support Ready

Going back to April 2024, SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 as an interesting RISC-V developer board to succeed their HiFive Unleashed that was a nice little RISC-V board. There were delays in shipping the HiFive Premier P550 but they have been making progress and are now ready to ship Ubuntu 24.04 LTS pre-installed on this RISC-V board. They have also lowered the pricing on these RISC-V boards...

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

[varikonniemi]

Oh shit, the only harsh criticism i had with their original launch was the insane pricing. I was told here on phoronix that it's completely OK by some enthusiasts.

Now with the pricing going from insane to acceptable for a developer release, let's see their justification for why it's too cheap.

[coder]

Oh shit, the only harsh criticism i had with their original launch was the insane pricing. I was told here on phoronix that it's completely OK by some enthusiasts.

It was not insane. The only reason you thought that is because you compared it to mass market SBCs, like the Raspberry Pi. You clearly don't understand the economics of mass market electronics.

Now with the pricing going from insane to acceptable for a developer release, let's see their justification for why it's too cheap.

My guess is that they simply had an order volume large enough that they could afford to offer it at a lower price point.

[Gamer1227]

Oh shit, the only harsh criticism i had with their original launch was the insane pricing. I was told here on phoronix that it's completely OK by some enthusiasts.

Now with the pricing going from insane to acceptable for a developer release, let's see their justification for why it's too cheap.

Like the guy said above, it is a dev board, with much lower volume than a Raspberry Pi 5 and it have features that are only used by developers.

The milkv Megrez uses the same P550 cores, and only costs 200 dollars.

[Quackdoc]

Although still out of the price range I would buy it for, Glad to see the price cut, It's hard to justify purchasing one of these before, but now it is quite a bit easier.

[usta]

This might be topic hijack but i'm currently developing an imageprocessing based system but it is way slower on my raspberrypi 5( 8gb ram ) system ( 20ms per image which i need around 8-10ms [ which i can get on my i7 7700hx laptop ] ). Do you have any sugestions other than raspberrypi5 ? ( but price tag should be almost same )
(cpp project based on opencv )

[edolnx]

phoronix I have one of these from the first batch, and have been helping with OS bring-up and GPU testing as part of my work as a RISC-V Ambassador. I would be happy to work with you to do some comparative testing. especially with some of the kernel performance improvement patches I've been adding into SiFive's kernel tree. Please feel free to get in touch with me if you are interested, and I may be able to get you a board via RISC-V International's Dev Boards program as well.

[Quackdoc]

This might be topic hijack but i'm currently developing an imageprocessing based system but it is way slower on my raspberrypi 5( 8gb ram ) system ( 20ms per image which i need around 8-10ms [ which i can get on my i7 7700hx laptop ] ). Do you have any sugestions other than raspberrypi5 ? ( but price tag should be almost same )
(cpp project based on opencv )

anything that has a supported NPU?

[geerge]

This might be topic hijack but i'm currently developing an imageprocessing based system but it is way slower on my raspberrypi 5( 8gb ram ) system ( 20ms per image which i need around 8-10ms [ which i can get on my i7 7700hx laptop ] ). Do you have any sugestions other than raspberrypi5 ? ( but price tag should be almost same )
(cpp project based on opencv )

Delved into simd? https://docs.opencv.org/4.x/d6/dd1/t...iv_intrin.html

There are faster SBC's for the same price as pi5, but maybe simd can get the performance you want.

[coder]

This might be topic hijack

It is, but those are practically welcomed on these forums!
🤣

i'm currently developing an imageprocessing based system but it is way slower on my raspberrypi 5( 8gb ram ) system ( 20ms per image which i need around 8-10ms [ which i can get on my i7 7700hx laptop ] ). Do you have any sugestions other than raspberrypi5 ?

If you're using OpenCV, maybe see if any of the stuff you need is supported by the Vulkan backend, on it? I doubt it's compiled into the Pi's distro build of OpenCV, so you might have to rebuild it, yourself.

OpenCV also has an OpenCL backend, but I don't know what sort of shape Rusticle is in for VideoCore VII.

Then again, Pi's GPU is pretty weak, so maybe those are both a waste of time if switching hardware is no issue for you.

You could try RK3588 (Orange Pi 5 Plus?), as apparently people have managed to get OpenCL working on its iGPU:

https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2022/07-11-mixtile-blade-3-opencl-perf.gmi

( but price tag should be almost same )

That's a little tougher, but if RK3588 (or RK3588S) options don't hit your target, maybe you can find some Alder Lake-N boards on AliExpress within your budget. The good news about them is that Intel's OpenCL driver is in excellent shape, if you need to go that route.

Good luck!