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.

The two news items from SiFive today are that Ubuntu Linux is now able to ship pre-installed on the HiFive Premier P550 following their engagement with Canonical. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the RISC-V build should now be in good shape on this board, similar to Ubuntu on the earlier HiFive Unleashed board.

The second news is that they have lowered the price. The HiFive Premier P550 board with 16GB of RAM is now priced at $399 USD, down from their original $599~650 USD pricing. The HiFive Premier P550 board with 32GB of RAM is now priced at $499 USD, down from the original ~$800 pricing for that model. They are nice price drops and make this new RISC-V board more palatable to hobbyists and others with tight budgets but still not quite to the level of the ARM single board computers popular with enthusiasts.

The updated pricing is listed at Arrow.com. As of writing though it still shows around a five week lead time on new Premier P550 board deliveries of the 16GB version or 12 weeks on the 32GB version. This RISC-V developer board features the SiFive P550 CPU, 128GB eMMC storage, 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5 memory, PCIe connectivity, M.2 storage support, USB 3, and more. Sadly though still no word from SiFive on any review samples for being able to better quantify the performance expectations of the P550 and being able to independently comment more on the Linux support and experience as we did back with the HiFive Unleashed. Hopefully we end up seeing a HiFive Premier P550 board but so far it's not sounding optimistic, which is troubling for why would they not want independent reviews as in the past.

Those wanting to learn more about the HiFive Premier P550 can do so at SiFive.com.