HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board

Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by throwaway2048 on Saturday February 03, 2018 @05:03PM (#16299945)

This board isn't really intended to be a "raspberry pi for everyone" style release, its pretty much soley aimed at developers and companies that want to port their software to RISC-V so when the cheaper boards do arrive, they will have software to run on them.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by garmaine on Sunday February 04, 2018 @04:59AM (#16302131)

I'm not sure there will be cheaper boards, to be honest. Just more fully functional ones with more peripheral types and added features I'm sure. This is a workstation-class CPU they are developing, not a RasPi competitor.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by qubex on Sunday February 04, 2018 @07:11AM (#16302435)

I’m curious to know what leads you to consider the RISC-V to be a “workstation-class CPU”. As I understand it’s an ISA that aims to be pretty broad, and is expected to compete (at least initially) with low-end embedded MIPS chips that are pretty ubiquitous everywhere in all sorts of devices.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by garmaine on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:32PM (#16304045)

I’m talking about U54 from SiFive specifically.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by opencl on Sunday February 04, 2018 @03:46PM (#16304819)

The U54 is squarely in the Pi competitor category. Claimed IPC is slightly lower at 1.7DMIPS/Mhz vs 2.3 for the Cortex-A53 in the Pi and this SoC clocks slightly higher than the Pi at 1.5Ghz vs 1.2Ghz, so performance should be quite similar. I certainly hope it manages to catch on and we get higher performance RISC-V chips at a reasonable cost in the future but these are clearly not it. If by "workstation class" you mean Skylake/Zen levels of performance there's a long way to go.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by jabl on Sunday February 04, 2018 @02:53PM (#16304533)

The U54 is a single-issue in-order core. Again, what makes you label that a "workstation-class core"?

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by garmaine on Monday February 05, 2018 @01:25AM (#16307000)

The company's stated plans for the product line.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by qubex on Monday February 05, 2018 @09:17AM (#16308832)

Well... this certainly isn’t workstation-class performance. This is more like a smartphone SoC.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by jabl on Monday February 05, 2018 @07:13AM (#16308304)

Hmm, my google-fu seems to be failing me, do you have a link where the company states that?

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by garmaine on Monday February 05, 2018 @12:26PM (#16310316)

No, I’ve learned about SiFive from the talks they’ve given at the RISC-V workshops. I think some of those are recorded, maybe look there? I’m on mobile and it’s hard to provide a link.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by nickik on Sunday February 04, 2018 @06:25AM (#16302351)

There are tons of other people who are working on RISC-V as well, LowRISC for example. The software should run everywhere.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by garmaine on Sunday February 04, 2018 @01:33PM (#16304051)

I’m talking about the Freedom Unleashes platform from SiFive.

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Re:HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board by Jedd on Sunday February 04, 2018 @08:00AM (#16302569)

> I'm not sure there will be cheaper boards, to be honest.

a) No need to assert honesty - we assume everyone is trying to be honest with each other here.

b) History is littered with people believing or claiming that some thing can not possibly become smaller / cheaper / faster ... it's a dangerous predictive path to wander, with basically no recorded precedents to cite.

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