The RISC-V HiFive Unleashed Linux dev board is available to order again

[brucehoult]

If anyone wanted one of these and missed out in the June 30 batch, pre-orders are now being taken for a production run for delivery November 30.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed

[aandrew]

a $1000 dev board without a single high speed interface (not even PCIe x1) -- right.

I do believe that RISC-V has a promising future but until there is a reasonable dev platform for mere mortals I guess I won't be part of it. I did order one of their MCU boards (HiFive1) and a strip of bare chips for playing around with the architecture on the low end, but this is not a very good development system for the high end, IMO. This is a quad-core, network computer with a severe I/O bottleneck.

[Monkeh]

a $1000 dev board without a single high speed interface (not even PCIe x1) -- right.

I do believe that RISC-V has a promising future but until there is a reasonable dev platform for mere mortals I guess I won't be part of it. I did order one of their MCU boards (HiFive1) and a strip of bare chips for playing around with the architecture on the low end, but this is not a very good development system for the high end, IMO. This is a quad-core, network computer with a severe I/O bottleneck.

Ah, but you can buy the $2000 expansion board to get PCIe.

[brucehoult]

a $1000 dev board without a single high speed interface (not even PCIe x1) -- right.

No one expects to sell millions of these boards. For a start, the CPU is engineering samples sharing a mask set with whatever other sample chips TSMC is doing at the time. So you get 100 chips in each batch, with a several month turn-around. It's pretty easy to deduce from the figures on the CrowdSupply page that there were 100 chips/boards available in each of the March 30 and June 30 deliveries, less boards kept for internal SiFive use or delivered to major customers directly.

However, *customers* are going into full production with chips containing SiFive cores. There were three press releases about three customer projects yesterday. Multiple customers are reporting SiFive RISC-V cores are 1/3 the size and use 1/3 the power of competitors' cores, on processes ranging down to 7 nm.

Overview: https://www.bit-tech.net/news/tech/storage/sifives-risc-v-cores-launch-in-two-ssd-families/1/

FADU: enterprise SSD controller with multiple E51s (64 bit, no MMU) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fadu-launches-industry-leading-ssd-solutions-powered-by-sifive-risc-v-core-ip-300693176.html

Mobiveil: E51 and U54 complex (as in HiFive Unleashed board) combined with FPGA as a configurable SSD controller https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mobiveil-inc-and-sifive-inc-partner-to-develop-risc-v-based-configurable-ssd-platform-for-data-center-and-enterprise-storage-applications-300693280.html

eSilicon: E2-series core (32 bit, 2-stage pipeline), in SerDes applications. This one is in 7 nm FinFET https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/esilicon-licenses-industry-leading-sifive-e2-core-ip-for-next-generation-serdes-ip-300692833.html

A FADU M.2 SSD incorporating SiFive 64 bit RISC-V cores:

[brucehoult]

Ah, but you can buy the $2000 expansion board to get PCIe.

Correct. Or you can use a Xilinx VC707 FPGA board ($3500) for the same purpose. The $2000 custom MicroSemi HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board gives a little bit of savings, as well as additional interfaces.

You can build the necessary bitstreams for the FPGAs on each board using Makefile.vc707-iofpga or Makefile.veraiofpga at https://github.com/sifive/freedom