SiFive Is Launching The Most Compelling RISC-V Development Board Yet

[Shtirlic]

$665 is much better than $999 but still is above real deal price that should be at least $200-300.

[wizard69]

Still not getting a good vibe that SiFive has or will have a good option for the desktop. This is an interesting board but it is a lot of money for what you get. This is one I may have to think about.

[lyamc]

$665 is much better than $999 but still is above real deal price that should be at least $200-300.

Consider what a regular Mini-ITX board + RAM + CPU would cost.

[microcode]

Still not getting a good vibe that SiFive has or will have a good option for the desktop. This is an interesting board but it is a lot of money for what you get. This is one I may have to think about.

Wells it's not a mass-market product, which is why it's nearly 700 USD rather than 150-250. It's meant to be within reach for some subset of competent software developers, and companies looking to explore, to encourage more porting of hard stuff like V8, Hotspot (and the various OpenJDK GCs), and maintaining self-building OS ports.

[pal666]

I always thought the real point was an effort by some of the big players to push others to reduce their licensing fees

you are very confused. risc-v was not started by big players

[digitalsin]

No onboard audio :\
I suppose you can get audio through a GPU, but that assumes your monitor has audio support...

[tildearrow]

The price is still a bit high

At least the processor is built-in, which makes up for the price.

[AndyChow]

You have more than 64 bits of addressing space ?

A specific scene in Monty Python is coming to mind.

No, but it's not flat 128-bit.

https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Tue1530-128bit-Addr-RISC-V-Wallach-Micron.pdf

Not a joke, it becomes a necessity at exascale levels.

[milkylainen]

So IMO we really need a sub $100 SBC, similar to the Raspberry Pi, to ignite real interest in Risc-V outside of the embedded market. SiFive is probably the only company that could do this, but so far they've been reluctant to do it.

I don't know much about the economics of such a product, but in the ARM space there's a bunch of options in that price range. It's definitely not a big money maker, but I think it would go a long ways towards driving enthusiasm for RISC-V.

Custom board, custom CPU. Low volume ASIC. Yeah. Not going to happen.
Even if it was sub $100 I doubt the "raspberry people" would care.
It's not like people care what CPU it is?
Claiming SiFive is "free" is about as true as calling ARM cores "free".

I don't see any point with this for general tinker projects. Nor was it the intention.
This is probably for developers looking to explorer the RISC-V ecosystem to evaluate the possibility to rid themselves of ARM.

[vladpetric]

No, but it's not flat 128-bit.

https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Tue1530-128bit-Addr-RISC-V-Wallach-Micron.pdf

Not a joke, it becomes a necessity at exascale levels.

Fair point!