News SiFive announces 64-bit 1.5GHz RISC-V HiFive Unleashed SBC

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That's what the FMC connector's for: the demos used an FMC with USB and PCIe gateware to provide additional connectivity, including video output. If you don't have an FMC to go with it, you're using the Ethernet port as your primary IO.

This specific chip will, I'll wager, see most use as a testbed and development platform - but a few generations down the line...

RISC-V in general, meanwhile, is on an absolute rocketship ride: Western Digital's switching to RISC-V with plans to ship billion cores within the next couple of years; Nvidia's replacing its in-house Falcon RISC ISA with RISC-V (PDF warning) having picked it over Arm, MIPS, ARC, and Tensilica; you've got COTS stuff landing from people like SiFive, mainline Linux support, proper toolchains; Samsung's already built a RISC-V MCU which it's likely to use in its consumer electronics products to save itself the Arm licence fee; and the RISC-V Foundation boasts Google, Micron, Microsemi, NXP, Qualcomm, and Rambus as Platinum Members with GlobalFoundries, Huawei, IBM, Lattice Semi, MediaTek, Mentor, Seagate, and Seimens among the Gold Member (oh, behave!) names you'll recognise. Exciting times!

 

Mate of mine's put his hard-earned up for the $1K HiFive Unleashed board, but drew the line at the $4K-ish the Xilinx FMC used in the demos would cost. Apparently Microsemi's working on a cheaper alternative, though I fear that in this instance "cheaper" is entirely relative.

He's lending me the board when it arrives, though, so expect benchies by the dozen (including the usual lazy comparison to a Raspberry Pi 3, 'cos it's just so easy to do - and I'm not expecting the Pi to lose on any of the categories bar possibly network throughput, but the interesting thing will be just how close what is effectively a first-generation chip on an entirely novel ISA built by a scrappy little startup that only built its first chip in November 2016 can get to a well-established Nth-generation implementation of Arm's ISA built by industry giant Broadcom.)

 

No, that's the SiFive HiFive1. Looks like an Arduino, walks like an Arduino, quacks like an Arduino, but it's actually an (up to) 320MHz RISC-V board. Shiny!

 

LoRaWAN, man, LoRAWAN.

 

That chip was literally SiFive's first commercial silicon, and it's designed purely for experimentation and RISC-V development. The focus is less on Developing A Thing, and more Developing on RISC-V at as Low a Cost as Possible. If you want more functionality, you can license the IP block and design your own SoC with whatever added features you like through SiFive's DesignShare platform.

Not sure about the power draw figure there, either: running at 256MHz ('cos the 320MHz mode wasn't available at the time) I had it drawing 63.4mA under sustained load compared to a 16MHz Arduino Uno at 47mA, an Arduino 101 at 61.6mA, and an Intel Edison at 76.3mA - in other words, it's entirely competitive to products from rivals that have been in the market way longer and are dozens of generations down the line.