<a href="https://liliputing.com/sifive-hifive-premiere-p550-risc-v-board-is-now-available-for-developers-in-very-limited-quantities/" rel="nofollow">https://liliputing.com/sifive-hifive-premiere-p550-risc-v-bo...</a><p>> Note that the $599 starting price is for a model with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory<p>That's incredibly expensive, I'd definitely wait for the sipeed/milkv SiFive P550 boards.<p>Here is a geekbench comparison of the P550 @1.4GHz vs Cortex-A72 @1.5GHz from the Pi4 (total scores: 150 vs 253): <a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/123?baseline=7469319" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/123?baseline=74...</a><p>A large part of the differences are clearly due to missing RVV in the P550.<p>I'm not sure, but this seems to be P550 @ 1.8GHz results (181): <a href="https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6049688" rel="nofollow">https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6049688</a><p>The 1.4GHz version is on paper barely faster than the 1.8/2GHz C910 cores that have been available for a while, it's only a slight upgrade if you can reach the 1.8GHz boost.
On the other-hand, this is just from geekbench, and many people reported that the C910 was surprisingly slow in real world compilation task, while the SiFive U74 performed a lot better than in comparison than geekbench would suggest.
Dramatic. :) For the potential fandom side of a dev board (other than companies being a fan of not paying for ARM licensing), a software person's questions:<p>* Does it work entirely with mainline Linux kernel, including drivers? Which version?<p>* Are all the onboard devices open firmware?<p>* Is it free of unwanted processors like Intel ME and AMD PSP?<p>* Is that a daughterboard? If so, is the daughterboard suitable as a module in production? If so, what is on the main board, other than connectors and passives?<p>* Is "full-size" PCIe 3.0 slot actually x16? (Hard to see the connector at 22s in the video.)<p>* How much RAM, and is it ECC? Upgradeable?<p>* The GPU is only suitable for, say, 1080p or 4K video playing, not for general-purpose or AI compute, correct?
I wish the “most powerful RISC-V” title would change hands more quickly.<p>Seems like we should be much further than we are today.<p>This board is touting incredible things like HDMI and dual gigabit Ethernet… it almost feels like they don’t want to be taken seriously, and that makes me sad.<p>Go faster. If you’re trying to keep excitement up by timing things, stop it. It is not working.
Most developers would prefer the much cheaper MILK-V Jupiter, which has RVA22 and Vector 1.0, thus allowing them to work on writing vector code. The step above that is to wait for the next big thing (MILK-V Oasis).<p>Without RVA22 or Vector, most of these boards are bound to end up as build machines for Linux distributions.
Here is the product page<p><a href="https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550" rel="nofollow">https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550</a><p>It is based on the ESWIN EIC7700X SoC with its quad core 1.8GHz RISC-V core<p><a href="https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/ZxLjE4F3NbkBXuzW_EIC7700XSOC_Manual_final.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/ZxLjE4F3NbkBXuzW_EIC770...</a><p>You also get Imagination AXM-8-256 'GPU' on chip. You get h264/h265 encode/decode and '3d support' in a yet-to-be-released driver.<p>Looks like a fairly promising product -- quite a step up from the unmatched
I think the point of this is that the P550 dev board is now starting to ship and be available “in the wild”. In which case, the press release might be a better link:<p><a href="https://www.sifive.com/press/hifive-premier-p550-development-boards-now-shipping" rel="nofollow">https://www.sifive.com/press/hifive-premier-p550-development...</a><p>From what I can tell, this is the early access version, not the Ubuntu version touted in the YouTube video. But, hopefully this will start to make RISC-V boards more widely available and mainstream. Especially as this dev board looks to include some necessary IO comforts.
>Note: These early access boards will not come with onboard GPU support or Ubuntu, but are fully upgradable to support those features with an upcoming software update before year end<p>Yikes... I'll wait<p>Source:
<a href="https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc" rel="nofollow">https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc</a>