SiFive Shifting Production Focus To Next-Gen HiFive Development Board

SiFive's HiFive Unmatched is the best, readily available RISC-V developer board at the moment with enough horsepower for modest development/porting work and continues seeing improvements with the mainline Linux kernel. But availability on HiFive Unmatched is beginning to dry up and SiFive isn't planning on any further production runs as it begins focusing on the board's successor.

The HiFive Unmatched has been a nice RISC-V developer board with SiFive's Freedom U740 SoC, 16GB of DDR4 memory, microSD and M.2 NVMe SSD storage support, one PCIe x16 slot, and Gigabit Ethernet. But it's becoming more difficult to find with today's supply chain issues and now SiFive focusing instead on their to-be-announced 2022 developer platform.

SiFive's Phil Dworsky wrote an update this week noting, "With such great ecosystem adoption, demand has exceeded our already high expectations, and we’re close to selling out our production inventory. Given the challenge of supply chain issues that we overcame for the first run of these boards (issues that we continue to face), we’ve decided to focus on the next generation SiFive HiFive development systems rather than trying to put together another build of the HiFive Unmatched platform in 2022."

Dworsky ended with, "Our sincere apologies to anyone wanting a SiFive HiFive Unmatched board who has been unable to obtain one – please stay tuned for news on the next generation HiFive development systems soon."

It will certainly be interesting to see what SiFive can deliver in 2022 for new developer boards... A faster SoC would certainly be nice. Some are also interested in socketed RAM support. Meanwhile there is growing interest and solutions around lower-cost developer boards, so we'll see if SiFive is pursing any new entrants there. In any case, stay tuned to Phoronix for more information and subsequent testing on new SiFive developer boards.