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

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.