For those complaining about price, you might want to look into costs that go into ASIC'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't work if priced for consumer market. They'd have to charge more or have ridiculous volume.

http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/a-lean-fabless-semicond...

The HiFive product uses a CPU they developed on 28nm. That's one of most expensive nodes you can use. Depending on if and how they split cost, fabbing those chips could'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.

There's been a lot of vaporware in FOSS-type hardware...

This is really cool, and I'd love to buy one, but it'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.

This is more interesting for showing progress in the RISC-V ecosystem than for hacking around with.

From the PDF: "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.". I.e. lower performance per clock vs an ARM Cortex A53 (2-way in-order execution 64 bit CPU).

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

What are the 8 SMA ports for? I've looked at the sifive page and the crowdsupply site as well; haven'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's $999. I mean, I get that it's not going to be as cheap as a Raspi, and I'd happily pay $200-300 for something like this. However, at $999, I think I'll wait.

Any peripherals on this thing? They mention Ethernet and some SPI flash. How about USB or even a UART? I didn'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 "Linux-capable" mean? Are there other RISC-V systems that are not "Linux-capable"?

So the price is high, but I'd actually consider getting one if only they'd exposed PCI ports and put it in, say, a MicroATX form factor or the like.

Maybe someone will make a daughterboard to make that happen for a reasonable price. Then I'd maybe have fun making a little machine to run it. I really like the idea of RISC-V.

Anybody have any idea how many MIPS we're talking here?

I'll probably be grabbing one as soon as it makes fiscal sense again. Kinda bummed for the price point, but they aren't a charity.

It'd also be nice if they had an exposed PCIe slot and/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't change things much - most people interested in the board won'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'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?

UART?

What's a good way to get involved in RISC-V

PUN MODE ON

HiFive is the cheapest non-vaporware upgrade path for Amiga enthusiasts (if they bring their own AGA GFX)

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.

1. Compute: A Quad core processor. A73 maybe? 2. Storage: 1 Sata Port to host 1 Hard disc. for Boot / 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.

That'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 <$20.

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's too new is to implement it on top of MAME.

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.

And the emulation provides some neat debugging opportunities.

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.

While my Pi isn't gathering dust, I too don't have the budget for a 1k dev board... I get that they probably have a lot of cost to cover, but at this point only investors can really buy this hardware (i.e. a company needing open CPU hardware for research or future products might invest in a 1k board)

It's a dev board. It's not intended for end users, it's intended for people prototyping new systems based around the SiFive.

Totally agree. One of the main advancements in the last several years IMO has been bringing the cost of this type of thing (ie; dev boards for microcontrollers, RPi, Arduino, etc) way, way down. I remember back in the day to get the equipment needed to program your own MCN or FPGA required a substantial investment, nowhere near approachable for a typical hobbyist or generally interested person. Now days you can order 3.3 and 5v arduino pro mini's by the caseload for $1.50 apiece.

Same here. Kinda bummed, I was looking forward to it :(

Never mind that said RPi have multiple USB and video ports to go along with ethernet (and on later models, wifi).

Also availability, availability, availability. The RPi can be bought from a multitude of places across the globe.

All that said, if we could get a version with a bit more onboard IO options, and preferably something like SATA, i would be all over it.

Honestly, if you want a full MMU with a Linux-capable RISC-V implementation and everything, and a few cores like this -- you'll need a fairly decent FPGA, as well as the clocking resources/peripherals so things aren't unusably slow. You can get cheap FPGAs for the microcontroller-class devices/cores, but the FPGAs SiFive recommend for U-series cores of theirs are quite expensive, like $4000. lowRISC can run on something like a $1500 Kintex-7 devkit, I think. There are better boards coming out soon at better price points (such as this one[1]) that might fit the bill, but then you have to do board setup yourself... It's not worth it IMO unless you plan on reusing the FPGA.

If you want a microcontroller class chip so you can just play with the 32-bit instruction set -- you can get that with QEMU and a $60 HiFive1 board. You can run picorv32 on a $50 FPGA, even! But if you want a Linux-class chip now (with full features you expect e.g. from an ARM-class device) -- this is about as good as it gets, I think. You won't get a 1.5ghz quad core performance like that cheaply. For now. Next year it'll be different, hopefully.

I imagine the real reason this board is pricey is due to limited volume runs for the ASIC on 28nm, which is the bulk (how many people will really buy one? these are early adoption systems), and, I speculate, some of the weird material choices. 8GB DDR4 ECC, ok sure that's cool and unique, but no SATA port? Really, so I'm stuck on a stupidly large microSD card? And they specify FMC, but FMC cards are typically very expensive for high-throughput devices (think HDMI, ADC/DACs, SFP/SFP+ breakouts). Maybe they'll just go all out and have the FMC mount the system directly onto a broken-out PCIe carrier board, or something? I dunno.

As for hacking... all that said, the rather large amount of RAM and relatively fast cores do excite me -- it means you can actually use the parallelism offered for things like actual compilation. And it's real privileged silicon, so for system porters/distros/etc I think it's probably more reasonable of a purchase. I'm eager to get NixOS running on a real silicon device like this, so I've supported it (I had a lot of fun with my HiFive1). If they had just included SATA, this would be almost a no-brainer for integrators/distro porters. I just hope they'll follow up on a decent expansion option... In the mean time until it ships, QEMU should be ironed out enough by now to start a real port...

[1] https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TEF1001-01-Kintex-7-PCIe...

The FPGA boards capable of running a U54 image (what this dev board is) are much more than $1k. And the resulting clock rate would be orders of magnitude less.

That said, FPGA boards are useful for doing interesting things with RISC-V, such as writing custom accelerators.

It all depends on what you're doing. If you make do with pure software, you should stay there. But if you want to execute a lot of instructions, for example to use CRASHME or descendant to look for bugs in the cpu implementation or Linux or whatever, being able to execute several orders of magnitude more instructions by paying more for an ASIC can be very worthwhile.

And before you think this is a silly example, I found a bug in a new microprocessor once using CRASHME. I was attempting to evaluate the quality of the supplier's testing.

They presented this at FOSDEM today, and ran the entire presentation (and a demo afterwards) on the actual hardware. They used PCI via an FPGA to interface with a standard ATI gfx card iirc. I don't know if the video is out yet, but have a look!

The page mentions an FMC connector for future expansion, a standard FPGA expansion interface supplying 34 to 160 10Gb/s signals.† I don't know about varieties and compatibility, but Hitec makes a great number of interface cards for it, including an 8 lane PCI Express.‡

␄

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA_Mezzanine_Card

‡ http://www.hitechglobal.com/Accessories/FMC_Modules.htm

There must be a UART because there's a FT223H and USB port at the top left.