I benchmarked these against a few other RISC-V boards. They're pretty fast, relative to RISC-V (although not relative to x86): <a href="https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-spacemit-x60-and-others/" rel="nofollow">https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-sp...</a><p>Note the benchmark is not very rigorous, but it reflects what we want to do with these boards which is to build Fedora packages.
$400 (16GB DDR5) and $500 (32GB DDR5) because that's not in the blog post.<p>But I have some questions:<p>Why the weird form factor? Mini-DTX is supported by a lot of cases but as a motherboard form factor it's incredibly niche compared to Mini-ITX and especially Micro-ATX.<p>Edit: DTX supposed to be an open standard but it's already a "dead" platform <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTX_(form_factor)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTX_(form_factor)</a><p>Why the eMMC? There is an M.2 E key but that's for wireless connection only. Is it a platform limitation that M.2 SSDs can't be used?
Note that the link in the announcement takes you to the 32 GB, which is (instantly?) out of stock.<p>16 GB (which is enough for a quad core, IMO) is $399 with "375 in stock, ships tomorrow"<p><a href="https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc" rel="nofollow">https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc</a><p>I ordered a Milk-V Megrez (same SoC but 1.8 GHz vs 1.4 GHz here) for $100 less a week ago. The price difference was much bigger then!
I get that RISC-V is exciting as an open-source phenomena,
but that is a pretty expensive piece of kit.<p>Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM
or Intel processors at the same price level?<p>Or more performance per watt?<p>Or an instructino set that makes a lot of operation super fast?<p>What is the upside?
Can someone who is more familiar with this SoC confirm for me that this P550 doesn't have the RISC-V "V" vector extensions? I'm seeing a GBC suffix which I guess means bit manipulation, compressed instructions, and whatever the G extension is which I don't fully understand (IMAFD plz explain?)
So the cool stuff "currently not supported in software", as usual in Linux workloads.<p>If I am paying for this with Ubuntu pre-installed, the very least is to fully support the hardware they are trying to sell.
"Now Available" must mean something different to SiFive than it does to me. When I click the links in the press release that purport to let me acquire one, they all say "No Stock Available," which means the opposite of "Now Available" to me.<p>They weren't loading at all earlier, though, so saying that I can't get one but showing me the price I can't get it at is some kind of improvement, I guess.