I realize this is a development board and primarily intended for embedded systems, but I don't see RISC-V breaking into the desktop/low end server market until they add PCIe slots and ATX/ITX form factors. It would be nice to use existing cases, power supplies, add-on cards, etc. for this platform.
I'm not sure what you've been looking at for your information, but the HiFive Premier P550 board that is the topic here:
- is Mini-DTX
- has an ATX power supply connector
- comes with a Mini-ITX compliant front panel connector
- has a PCIe Gen 3 x16 slot (x4 populated)
- has SATA 3 for hard disk
The other board I mentioned with the same SoC, the Milk-V Megrez, is Mini-ITX and allows powering it either via ATX power, or a 12V barrel socket (5.5x2.5mm), if you do want to use the board bare. It also has a PCIe slot and SATA 3.
The older dual-issue in-order (the P550 is 3-way OoO) Milk-V Jupiter (July 2024) and HiFive Unmatched (May 2021) are also Mini-ITX boards with a PCIe slot, but PCIe M.2 for SSD rather than the SATA PCs like to use.
The Milk-V Pioneer (Jan 2024) is also Mini-ITX and has 2x PCIe slots (x16, x8), 2x M.2 M-Key PCIe slots (4 lanes each), 5 SATA 3, a total of 32 PCIe lanes, 64 2.0 GHz OoO CPU cores, 128 GB RAM in 4 DDR4 channels.
I believe AMD was working on getting their newer GPUs to play nice RISC-V systems.
Nothing to do with AMD doing anything. There are good open source drivers for AMD video cards and they have been working just fine on RISC-V since the first Linux-capable board in early 2018. Here's a RISC-V machine running an RX 580 on LTT in August 2018 -- it was working six months earlier:
With the RDNA 2 boards in 2020, the driver started using Floating Point in the Linux device driver, something which early RISC-V kernels assumed no one would do, so the kernel saved and restored the floating point registers and other state when switching between user processes, but not when switching between a user process and the kernel.
Independent developer René Rebe added support for FP in the kernel in mid 2021 (a month after the HiFive Unmatched came out). "[It] took only 10 hours to debug and proof-of-concept patch the Linux kernel to support [the] additional requirements of AMDGPU for RISCV64 to use the newly arrived RX 6700XT Navy Flounder [graphics card]," Rebe explains of his work, "w[ith] additional VAAPI hardware accelerated video encoding on the HiFive SiFive Unmatched board!"
A comment on that video says "Good to see it works for you on RISCV. For PowerPC community, it is a bit bumpy."
The kernel community moves slowly, but a SiFive employee got FP support in the kernel (and therefore RNDA 2) upstreamed and it was released in 6.10 so people with RNDA 2 boards no longer need to use a patched kernel. The patch had of course been available for years.
No work from AMD on this.