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

[kreijack]

Are there any realistic MIPS options for running Linux?

Most adsl modems are MIPS based. So you can have a decent MIPS system and linux "friendly" buying an adsl modem compatible with lede/openwrt.

[PerformanceExpert]

If anyone's curious about performance, Sifive compares the U7x cores to the Cortex-A55 - so, fairly capable for an embedded core, but likely well behind the faster ARM options (even ones like the A72 in the Pi) at iso clock; this is a dual-issue, in-order core, albeit what looks like a fairly aggressive one.

https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive...erformance.pdf has more information on the microarchitecture if anyone's curious.

It's likely close to a Cortex-A53 on integer code, so it will be interesting to see a comparison with the old PI 3 (4x 1.4GHz Cortex-A53 for $35).

[Radtraveller]

Can I playsz doom?

[brucehoult]

The 2 1/2 year old 1.5 GHz HiFive Unleashed is already faster than a Pi 3.

If this has come in at 2 GHz as anticipated (they don't seem to have said) then it should be similar performance to an Odroid C4 (quad 2.0 GHz A55) or Pi 4 (lower MHz but higher IPC)

Of course the price is higher because its intended market is a lot different, and it's low volume hardware using a brand new chip, not a repurposed settop box or tablet chip that has already paid off its production costs.

[elatllat]

Interesting, I wonder if it requires any hardware mitigations, and if we will see a fully open / Libre version this decade.

[igxqrrl]

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.

I agree about the cost. It's challenging and not going to be a big money maker. But until now SiFive has been doing much of the heavy lifting in terms of porting and optimizing software for RISC-V. A $100 SBC lets a lot of curious people participate in that endeavor. More people than you might imagine care about the CPU.

I didn't call the SiFive core "free", but comparing a RISC-V core to ARM is disingenuous.

I don't argue that this $600 board is intended for tinker projects. $600 is real money. Sub-$100 is, for many people, impulse-purchase territory. You'll suddenly attract computer engineering students who are studying RISC-V, not to mention the admittedly small number of compute purists who use ARM or X86 only because they can't get a cheap MIPS system.

Also, if you're SiFive, it gives you a great deal of street cred. Right now outside of the RISC-V community, nobody has heard of it.

[ayumu]

Considering the When this is getting released, I'm somewhat disappointed the cores used do not implement the V extension.

[Spacefish]

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

recently build an office PC, it was less than 250€ for a full build!
- Quadcore Zen+ APU
- A320 based Mini ITX Board with dual HDMI
- 8 GB DDR 4 RAM
- 240GB SATAIII SSD (when will sata die.. i wish they would just get rid of the sata controllers on the boards and just offer PCIe M2)
- Case with Powersupply

so yeah ~245€ for a complete PC with quite some performance..

However this is a dev board, with a custom ASIC CPU which is made in small quantaties.. So ~650$ is a really good price for that board! Look at the Xilinx ARM Devboards for example, they will run you 2500€+

[lyamc]

recently build an office PC, it was less than 250€ for a full build!
- Quadcore Zen+ APU
- A320 based Mini ITX Board with dual HDMI
- 8 GB DDR 4 RAM
- 240GB SATAIII SSD (when will sata die.. i wish they would just get rid of the sata controllers on the boards and just offer PCIe M2)
- Case with Powersupply

so yeah ~245€ for a complete PC with quite some performance..

I just want to point out that you’re talking about an old motherboard with an old APU with low specs for ram and SSD storage.

[bridgman]

There's a post on Reddit & video of one of these boards with an RX480 that suggests our open source graphics drivers are running on it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/jkh98q/radeon_gpu_linux_kernel_drivers_are_apparently/

I didn't know that either