4 ms·

I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?

pmorici 9y ago
The HiFive1 from sifive for $60 is what I got. https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive1/ https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive1/
wanderingjew 9y ago
You can buy one from SiFive: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 although it's going to be a while until a RISC-V chip will be packaged on a board with USB, Ethernet, SATA, and all peripherals that make an ATX motherboard or a Raspberry Pi worth owning.
deepnotderp 9y ago
SiFive
microcolonel 9y ago
You can buy the HiFive1 board (I have a few and they're swell), but it's more of a microcontroller than an application processor, the board is Arduino compatible. If you want something more like a Raspberry Pi or bigger, you'll have to wait a bit longer. The Freedom Unleashed platform is coming down the pipe, and you can pre-evaluate it on an FPGA board (albeit at lower frequency, and fairly pricy since it's a complex design and requires a fairly large FPGA to prototype). I won't pretend to know when they'll have a standard Freedom U500 SoC dev board, but it will have multiple cores, PCIe 3.0, USB 3, Gigabit ethernet, and DDR4 compatibility according to their website[1]. [1]: https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/
ktta 9y ago
Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ The FPGA board can be used for other things too. If you are really adventurous, I'd suggest buying a FPGA board with better chip so you can fit in larger IP blocks in the future. It will work perfectly fine as a replacement for the above FPGA kit I've linked to. My suggestion would be this[1]. It has a pretty large LUT count so you can go nuts. The RAM and Ethernet will be pretty useful if you want to run linux[2] and test out stuff. It'll be a bit hard to run linux on it right now. On the other hand, you can choose a Parallela board[3] which comes with a FPGA chip along with a new (soon to be retired) arch called epiphany. Here[4] is a GSoC project which runs linux on that board using the FPGA. [1]: http://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-ddr-artix-7-fpga-trainer-board-recommended-for-ece-curriculum/ http://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-ddr-artix-7-fpga-traine... [2]: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux [3]: https://www.parallella.org/ https://www.parallella.org/ [4]: https://github.com/eliaskousk/parallella-riscv https://github.com/eliaskousk/parallella-riscv
- e12e 9y ago
  I see that what they recommend for the freedom platform https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ today, is a dev board https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ that costs around 3500 USD: https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-kits/xilinx/ek-v7-vc707-g-3074457345626227804/ https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k... Do anyone here know what kind of "classic pc" performance one is likely to get out of a board like that? Could you get on the order of low-end pc (~500 dollar soc / netbook with real gigabit ethernet, sata6 and usb3) from something like that, if paired up with a reasonable cpu design?
  - q3k 9y ago
    A somewhat speed-optimized IP CPU core [1] runs at 600DMIPs on a Virtex7. I would hope that SiFive is in the same ballpark, but it's probably slower. Even in a best-case scenario, this is nowhere near a low end consumer PC. edit: For reference, my 5 years old Thinkpad x230 does around 7400 DMIPs per core. [1] - https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html
    - e12e 9y ago
      Well, that actually sounds a lot better than I feared - I have a aging aspire acer one that works fine as a lightweight Linux desktop.
  - brucehoult 9y ago
    The $3500 board is a lot, yes. There is also a $99 "Arty" board that is enough to run what is in the HiFive1, and I think even to add an MMU and run Linux. The $3500 one has enough space to do multiple cores, FPU and so forth as well. Both the $99 and $3500 FPGA boards run a Rocket CPU at 65 MHz, which is pretty slow, though faster than you get with a software cycle-accurate simulator on a workstation.
ddcc7 9y ago
For an FPGA to play around with, the Lattice ECP-5G is really nice: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/FPGAandCPLD/ECP5andECP55GConnectivityCoProcessing.aspx http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/FPGAandCPLD/ECP5andEC... . PCIE and DDR3, in a $99 dev board.
FullyFunctional 9y ago
(Public service announcement: https://riscv.org/forum/ https://riscv.org/forum/) Others have the SiFive chip, but if you want to boot Linux then your best option currently is running Rocket on an FPGA kit. I expect that we'll soon have more options. If you just want to play around, then I'd recommend Spike or Fabrice's https://bellard.org/riscvemu/ https://bellard.org/riscvemu/
tyingq 9y ago
People mentioned the siFive option, but that's a microcontroller. If you were looking for a 64 bit processor implementation, without having to use an FPGA... It looks like the first dev board that would be capable of running linux will likely be the lowRISC project. "We are expecting to crowdfund an initial instantiation of the lowRISC platform during the course of 2017" http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/
- brucehoult 9y ago
  I'll buy a LoweRISC as soon as they have something for sale (and I have one of the first HiFive1s). But at the rate both organisations are progressing I expect to be able to get a quad core 1.6 GHz 64 bit RISC-V "Pi-like" board from SiFive before LowRISC. Possibly even this year. I've gathered from other things they've said that they're sampling wafers with that SoC about now. Ideally, they'll both succeed.

pmorici 9y ago

The HiFive1 from sifive for $60 is what I got. https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive1/ https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive1/

wanderingjew 9y ago

You can buy one from SiFive: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 although it's going to be a while until a RISC-V chip will be packaged on a board with USB, Ethernet, SATA, and all peripherals that make an ATX motherboard or a Raspberry Pi worth owning.

deepnotderp 9y ago

SiFive

microcolonel 9y ago

You can buy the HiFive1 board (I have a few and they're swell), but it's more of a microcontroller than an application processor, the board is Arduino compatible. If you want something more like a Raspberry Pi or bigger, you'll have to wait a bit longer. The Freedom Unleashed platform is coming down the pipe, and you can pre-evaluate it on an FPGA board (albeit at lower frequency, and fairly pricy since it's a complex design and requires a fairly large FPGA to prototype). I won't pretend to know when they'll have a standard Freedom U500 SoC dev board, but it will have multiple cores, PCIe 3.0, USB 3, Gigabit ethernet, and DDR4 compatibility according to their website[1]. [1]: https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/

ktta 9y ago

Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ The FPGA board can be used for other things too. If you are really adventurous, I'd suggest buying a FPGA board with better chip so you can fit in larger IP blocks in the future. It will work perfectly fine as a replacement for the above FPGA kit I've linked to. My suggestion would be this[1]. It has a pretty large LUT count so you can go nuts. The RAM and Ethernet will be pretty useful if you want to run linux[2] and test out stuff. It'll be a bit hard to run linux on it right now. On the other hand, you can choose a Parallela board[3] which comes with a FPGA chip along with a new (soon to be retired) arch called epiphany. Here[4] is a GSoC project which runs linux on that board using the FPGA. [1]: http://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-ddr-artix-7-fpga-trainer-board-recommended-for-ece-curriculum/ http://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-ddr-artix-7-fpga-traine... [2]: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux [3]: https://www.parallella.org/ https://www.parallella.org/ [4]: https://github.com/eliaskousk/parallella-riscv https://github.com/eliaskousk/parallella-riscv

e12e 9y ago
I see that what they recommend for the freedom platform https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ https://www.sifive.com/products/freedom/ today, is a dev board https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/ that costs around 3500 USD: https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-kits/xilinx/ek-v7-vc707-g-3074457345626227804/ https://www.avnet.com/shop/us/p/kits-and-tools/development-k... Do anyone here know what kind of "classic pc" performance one is likely to get out of a board like that? Could you get on the order of low-end pc (~500 dollar soc / netbook with real gigabit ethernet, sata6 and usb3) from something like that, if paired up with a reasonable cpu design?
- q3k 9y ago
  A somewhat speed-optimized IP CPU core [1] runs at 600DMIPs on a Virtex7. I would hope that SiFive is in the same ballpark, but it's probably slower. Even in a best-case scenario, this is nowhere near a low end consumer PC. edit: For reference, my 5 years old Thinkpad x230 does around 7400 DMIPs per core. [1] - https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/microblaze.html
  - e12e 9y ago
    Well, that actually sounds a lot better than I feared - I have a aging aspire acer one that works fine as a lightweight Linux desktop.
- brucehoult 9y ago
  The $3500 board is a lot, yes. There is also a $99 "Arty" board that is enough to run what is in the HiFive1, and I think even to add an MMU and run Linux. The $3500 one has enough space to do multiple cores, FPU and so forth as well. Both the $99 and $3500 FPGA boards run a Rocket CPU at 65 MHz, which is pretty slow, though faster than you get with a software cycle-accurate simulator on a workstation.

ddcc7 9y ago

For an FPGA to play around with, the Lattice ECP-5G is really nice: http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/FPGAandCPLD/ECP5andECP55GConnectivityCoProcessing.aspx http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/FPGAandCPLD/ECP5andEC... . PCIE and DDR3, in a $99 dev board.

FullyFunctional 9y ago

(Public service announcement: https://riscv.org/forum/ https://riscv.org/forum/) Others have the SiFive chip, but if you want to boot Linux then your best option currently is running Rocket on an FPGA kit. I expect that we'll soon have more options. If you just want to play around, then I'd recommend Spike or Fabrice's https://bellard.org/riscvemu/ https://bellard.org/riscvemu/

tyingq 9y ago

People mentioned the siFive option, but that's a microcontroller. If you were looking for a 64 bit processor implementation, without having to use an FPGA... It looks like the first dev board that would be capable of running linux will likely be the lowRISC project. "We are expecting to crowdfund an initial instantiation of the lowRISC platform during the course of 2017" http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/

brucehoult 9y ago
I'll buy a LoweRISC as soon as they have something for sale (and I have one of the first HiFive1s). But at the rate both organisations are progressing I expect to be able to get a quad core 1.6 GHz 64 bit RISC-V "Pi-like" board from SiFive before LowRISC. Possibly even this year. I've gathered from other things they've said that they're sampling wafers with that SoC about now. Ideally, they'll both succeed.