SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V Development Board Update

Earlier this year SiFive announced the HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board with plans for shipping in July. That timeframe for shipping since passed but SiFive today issued a new update on their RISC-V development board.

The SiFive HiFive Unmatched was the first nice RISC-V development board out there and decently powerful for the time. But we've been excited to see a new and more powerful development board. Thus we've been very eager for the HiFive Premier P550 with four SiFive P550 cores, 16GB of LPDDR5 memory, support for AMD discrete graphics, Gigabit Ethernet, and other connectivity options on this micro-DTX form factor board.

Posted today on the SiFive blog was a status update on the Premier P550 development board:

"Providing a great out-of-the-box experience is a top priority. That’s why we’ve been taking some extra time with the upcoming HiFive Premier P550 Board. While we’re as eager as anyone to get this board into developers’ hands, we made the decision to ship with Ubuntu out of the box earlier in the year following several discussions with Canonical about how we could partner closer with them and create the best possible hardware and software combination with this exciting new board. The slight delay wasn’t a decision we made lightly, but we believe it was the best way to enhance the experience for the widest possible range of developers and ensure that everyone who buys this board has everything they need to hit the ground running. In addition, it will also allow us to keep these boards up to date via the built-in over-the-air (OTA) update capability, which is a great feature."

SiFive also posted this video today showing off the developer board:

More details on this board can be found at SiFive.com. So far I haven't heard from SiFive about any review samples of the Premier P550 but hopefully we'll end up receiving one for delivering some interesting RISC-V Linux benchmarks from this board.