HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board

For those complaining about price, you might want to look into costs that go into ASIC&#x27;s. Adapteva has a nice write-up on that with their strategies for getting cost down. Note that it was critical to have a few million with a strategy that their own write-up said couldn&#x27;t work if priced for consumer market. They&#x27;d have to charge more or have ridiculous volume.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adapteva.com&#x2F;andreas-blog&#x2F;a-lean-fabless-semiconductor-startup-model&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adapteva.com&#x2F;andreas-blog&#x2F;a-lean-fabless-semicond...</a><p>The HiFive product uses a CPU they developed on 28nm. That&#x27;s one of most expensive nodes you can use. Depending on if and how they split cost, fabbing those chips could&#x27;ve cost over a million dollars in masks. Low-volume, RISC workstations used to cost five digits each on older nodes. Getting a low-volume CPU on cutting-edge node for a grand is a great improvement. So long as they ship products that work as claimed.<p>There&#x27;s been a lot of vaporware in FOSS-type hardware...

This is really cool, and I&#x27;d love to buy one, but it&#x27;s an order of magnitude too pricey for me to justify the purchase when I already have a (admittedly probably slightly weaker) raspberry pi gathering dust.

Having an actual RISC-V ASIC is cool, but note that you can run a RISC-V softcore on a significantly cheaper FPGA board - or even in software simulation.<p>This is more interesting for showing progress in the RISC-V ecosystem than for hacking around with.

From the PDF: &quot;Each U54 core has a high-performance single-issue in-order 64-bit execution pipeline, with a peak sustained execution rate of one instruction per clock cycle.&quot;. I.e. lower performance per clock vs an ARM Cortex A53 (2-way in-order execution 64 bit CPU).<p>As prototype, the price is OK, in my opinion. In volume there is no reason for not selling a tiny board with those specs for under 40 USD (e.g. 2GB RAM Pine 64 quad Cortex A53 boards with gigabit ethernet are below 30 USD, including 3D and video acceleration).

There is a little more information on the crowdsupply page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;sifive&#x2F;hifive-unleashed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;sifive&#x2F;hifive-unleashed</a>

What are the 8 SMA ports for? I&#x27;ve looked at the sifive page and the crowdsupply site as well; haven&#x27;t been able to figure it out. Not obvious why a RISC-V development board would have SMA ports.

Excited about RISC-V hardware hitting the market, less excited that it&#x27;s $999. I mean, I get that it&#x27;s not going to be as cheap as a Raspi, and I&#x27;d happily pay $200-300 for something like this. However, at $999, I think I&#x27;ll wait.

Any peripherals on this thing? They mention Ethernet and some SPI flash. How about USB or even a UART? I didn&#x27;t expect a frame buffer, but what does it actually have? I thought they were going to have PCI via an FPGA, but no sign of that either.

What does &quot;Linux-capable&quot; mean? Are there other RISC-V systems that are <i>not</i> &quot;Linux-capable&quot;?

So the price is high, but I&#x27;d actually consider getting one if only they&#x27;d exposed PCI ports and put it in, say, a MicroATX form factor or the like.<p>Maybe someone will make a daughterboard to make that happen for a reasonable price. Then I&#x27;d maybe have fun making a little machine to run it. I really like the idea of RISC-V.<p>Anybody have any idea how many MIPS we&#x27;re talking here?

I&#x27;ll probably be grabbing one as soon as it makes fiscal sense again. Kinda bummed for the price point, but they aren&#x27;t a charity.<p>It&#x27;d also be nice if they had an exposed PCIe slot and&#x2F;or exposed DIMM slots at this price point, but GbE is good enough for rapid testing.

They might as well put $10,000 instead $1,000 and it wouldn&#x27;t change things much - most people interested in the board won&#x27;t buy it as the price is prohibitive. They would have to go below $100 at the very least.

Anybody knows why it is so expensive? Is it just the low quantities?

It&#x27;s a great step towards making these chips more generally available. I am sure they will release a low cost dev board like the rpi pretty soon.

Could anyone suggest other boards like this with intel cpus equivalent in terms of performance?

Can anyone ellaborate on how this compares to say ARM, intel etc?

woop woop! RISC-V is excellent and I hope this is the first of many!

Why so pricey?

Virtualization?<p>UART?

What&#x27;s a good way to get involved in RISC-V

PUN MODE ON<p>HiFive is the cheapest non-vaporware upgrade path for Amiga enthusiasts (if they bring their own AGA GFX)<p>PUN MODE OFF

Sorry could someone explain to me why this is $999? ( Apart from because they can.)

My ideal SERVER motherboard for home use: Raspberry Pi style.<p>1. Compute: A Quad core processor. A73 maybe? 2. Storage: 1 Sata Port to host 1 Hard disc. for Boot &#x2F; Storage. 3. Network: 1 Gigabit Ethernet port. 4. Power: 1 Micro USB port. 5. RAM: 1 GB or optional 2 GB. 3. 1 USB for everything else.<p>That&#x27;s it. No Audio port, No HDMI port, No GPIO Port. No Camera port, No extra USB ports. No MicroSD connector. Now considering Raspberry price of $35, I guess board could be done for &lt;$20.<p>Every few days, I try to find one.

Perhaps a cheaper route to have an OS up and running on a reference design for hardware that&#x27;s too new is to implement it on top of MAME.<p>Even if it takes an 8-way Xeon Platinum to run it at a reasonable speed, I think more people will be able to experiment with it.<p>And the emulation provides some neat debugging opportunities.