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HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board
- urlwolf 9y agoCan anyone ellaborate on how this compares to say ARM, intel etc?
- ttul 9y agoIt’s an open source design.
- wklm 9y agois it an fpga?
- nine_k 9y agoNo, as far as I can tell, it's an actual RISC-V ASIC; it has 5 cores on a 28nm die. I'm afraid the amount of FPGA required for 4 beefier cores + 1 simpler core + 2 MB coherent L1 cache could cost more than $999, but I may be wrong.
- tyingq 9y agoI get the difference between FPGA and ASIC. But... What's the difference between a CPU core on an ASIC and a normal CPU core?
- q3k 9y agoYou seem to be confused about the terminology. A typical CPU core is an ASIC. An ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) is exactly what it says on the tin - an integrated circuit designed to perform one function - in this case, executing machine code. Most of the chips you see inside electronics are ASICs (everything from operational amplifiers to ethernet PHYs and CPUs).
- tyingq 9y agoI don't usually see the two terms used together, because of the "application specific" vs "general purpose" thing. So I thought there might be something I was missing.
- nine_k 9y agoFPGA is more "general purpose" because you can reconfigure it for almost any purpose. A CPU, compared to it, is more "application-specific", though not as specific as e.g. an ASIC for handling crypro. I probably added too much contrast into my original comment.
- dmytroi 9y agoIt is not AFAIK, this chip contains E51 and U54 cores, E51 from what I seen (when prices were public) costs $595000. --- Upd: some news articles still mention launch prices [0] - [0] https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/chinese-start-up-sells-try-and-buy-si-ip-online https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/chinese-start-up-sells-...
- nickpsecurity 9y agoTo put that into perspective, reports I read put MIPS at $700-900k with ARM starting at $1+ million. Buyers of those get their ecosystem of existing tools, OS's, libraries, etc. RISC-V doesn't have much of an ecosystem yet. However, if FOSS software covers application requirements, then a SOC using the RISC-V chip saves a lot of money upfront. Even more down the line since SiFive doesn't charge royalties. (Edited to change part about royalties after reading article more closely.)
- baobrien 9y agoFrom what I understand, the RTL of these cores and a good chunk of the stuff around them is open [1]. The cores themselves are basically all specialized Rocket cores. What you're paying for is probably the ready-to-fab routed cores in whatever CAD format and support. [1] https://github.com/sifive/freedom https://github.com/sifive/freedom
- garmaine 9y agoThey charge for the peripheral IP and system design. The actual computation core architectures are freely available on GitHub under open source license.
- walkingolof 9y agoRISC-V is a open specification (actually a couple of them) backed by a the RISC-V foudnation, which "anyone" can use to implement a design on their own. So they are closer to what ARM is, which licenses IP for others to implement.
- tux3 9y agoThis 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.
- CocoaGeek 9y agoSame here. Kinda bummed, I was looking forward to it :(
- tux3 9y agoLooking at their crowdsupply page, they did make a smaller arduino-like board [0] at a very reasonnable $59 price point. I'm not sure if those are still available, but you might want to check it out! [0]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1
- dbcurtis 9y agoPretty different board. RISC-V ISA has various well-defined subsets. The cheap board is the microcontroller end of the spectrum. This CPU has an MMU, etc.
- oneplane 9y agoWhile 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)
- fit2rule 9y agoI'm gonna buy one, because I'm quite used to spending $1k on computers .. been doing it for decades .. and this machine is the kind of machine I'd rather be spending my next $1k on, than say, the current commercial crop. So I hope this won't be the first rev, and that I look back in 2 years or so and go 'well, time to upgrade it' .. this would be an economic as well as practically good investment. You know, like any computer you might purchase ..
- lerie82 9y agoWhy so pricey?
- herogreen 9y agoThere is a little more information on the crowdsupply page: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed
- phkahler 9y agoAny 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.
- hucker 9y agoThey 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!
- phkahler 9y agoThat's what I hoped could be done. Did they use an open source ATI driver compiled for risc-v? That would make for a very interesting development rig.
- digi_owl 9y agoNo video yet that i can find, but it seem the slides are available. https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/ https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/
- mrob 9y agoThere must be a UART because there's a FT223H and USB port at the top left.
- Narishma 9y agoAnybody knows why it is so expensive? Is it just the low quantities?
- extrapickles 9y agoIt looks like it uses an ASIC, which in low quantities are fairly expensive.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y agoThat, and customers for this kind of board are typically expected to be working on a project with a significant budget where management wouldn't even bat an eye at dropping $1000 on a development tool.
- trimbo 9y agoMaybe the pricing is to keep out people who would only buy low volumes of chips later? Sony used to price Playstation 2 dev kits at $thousands. I always figured that pricing was to ensure only rich companies with e.g. marketing budgets were going to develop games.
- garmaine 9y agoFrankly they are probably losing money at a $1k price point, with the millions they have probably spent in 28nm production runs. They're making a long play here. It's a bit bizarre that people are expecting RaspPi prices this.
- joezydeco 9y agoRpi has really mutated what people expect out of EVKs. What started as an "educational" board has pretty much turned into a turnkey cheap Linux board for a lot of people. So they expect that out of every board now. I also wish Broadcom hadn't dumped these things under market price. That's another thing that has really messed up expectations.
- SXX 9y ago
- wklm 9y agoCould anyone suggest other boards like this with intel cpus equivalent in terms of performance?
- TickleSteve 9y agoWith intel... any number of PC motherboards. With ARM... any number of quad-core ~1.2GHz boards. Either of the above can easily be had for a few percent of the cost of the RISC-V board, will likely out-perform it and they're losing money on each one of them.
- wmf 9y agoYou might have to go back a few years to find an Atom this slow. But for <$200 you can get a much faster Atom board like the UP Squared: http://linuxgizmos.com/sub-100-dollar-maker-board-packs-apollo-lake-4k-video-dual-gbe/ http://linuxgizmos.com/sub-100-dollar-maker-board-packs-apol...
- mastax 9y agohttps://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm Though, as the other commenter mentioned, there are dozens.
- andreiw 9y agoVirtualization? UART?
- mastax 9y agoVirtualization instructions aren't finished yet: https://riscv.org/specifications/privileged-isa/ https://riscv.org/specifications/privileged-isa/
- JoachimSchipper 9y agoHaving 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.
- aseipp 9y agoHonestly, 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-FMC-Carrier-with-Xilinx-Kintex-7-160T-4-lane-PCIe-GEN2?c=462 https://shop.trenz-electronic.de/en/TEF1001-01-Kintex-7-PCIe...
- ams6110 9y agoWhat does "Linux-capable" mean? Are there other RISC-V systems that are not "Linux-capable"?
- pinewurst 9y agoI think they mean it has a real MMU capable of memory protection and virtual memory. Earlier RISC-V cores came out before this was agreed to as a standard.
- cowboysauce 9y agoYes, the same company sells arduino compatible RISC-V microcontroller boards that are not capable of running Linux.
- jecel 9y agoRISC-V is defined by two standards. The older user level one is pretty stable but the newer supervisor level one is still changing so many existing RISC-V systems don't implement it. That doesn't necessarily keep you from running Linux on them but it does mean they need a special port. This new product will be able to boot "standard" Linux binaries as will any future system implementing the supervisor spec.
- benchaney 9y agoThe other ones are just microcontrolers. This is the first one that is capable of running a full operating system.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoThey 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.
- ams6110 9y agoAcademic buyers won't have a big problem with that price. It's a drop in the bucket in the scope of all but the smallest research budgets.
- rbanffy 9y agoThat's a good way to sell half a dozen boards. :-( It may work to bootstrap a larger market, but this board will not be a hot seller.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mhayenga 9y agoEh, if they have a defined project maybe... $100 = Would buy this on a whim on the off-chance it's usable. Also, would consider buying 12x of them to outfit an undergrad lab. $1000 = Have to have a clear project/vision in mind of how the board would be used and how other methods (FPGA/emulation) couldn't suffice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- garmaine 9y agoData point of 1: I just purchased an early-access dev board ($1,250), but I wouldn't have at $10k. $1k is too expensive for most individual hobbyists, unfortunately, but cheap enough that it can be considered a petty cash expense in my employer's hardware R&D effort. I think it was perfectly priced.
- webaholic 9y agoIt'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.
- ch_123 9y agoExcited 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.
- ksec 9y agoSorry could someone explain to me why this is $999? ( Apart from because they can.)
- garmaine 9y ago28nm custom CPUs. They've spent millions on setting up the production run. They are probably losing money on this board alone, to be honest, at that price point and expected sales.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoFor 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-semiconductor-startup-model/ 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...
- monocasa 9y agoI was under the impression that (albeit as of a year ago or so) 28nm was the cheapest node you could work on. The end of Moore's law is starting to hit the industry and smaller nodes were more expensive per transistor still.
- nickpsecurity 9y agoMy prior data said most designs were being done well above 28nm (even 90nm) with mask costs increasing as the feature size got smaller. eASIC even still offers 45nm S-ASIC's (Nextreme-2's) for those who can't afford ASIC's at that node. So, I'd be surprised if 28nm cheaper. If 28nm has gotten that cheap, then I'd love to have references on that to give to CompSci folks I've seen doing semi-open or FOSS designs from 90nm-32nm. Note: I'm also talking for complex designs like a CPU or SoC instead of Bitcoin-mining primitives or something. Edit: see my response to wmf as I partly answer thoughts on your other question about volume or eating up costs.
- monocasa 9y agoOhhhh, ok. I think you're totally right for lowish volume runs like this. My information was in the context of where you have enough volume to amortize the mask cost out. Maybe SiFive is eating the cost here either with the hope that they can sit at 28nm for a while and treat this chip as gravy train money in the long term? Or maybe they just want 28nm experience for higher volume runs in the future?
- rbanffy 9y agoPerhaps 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.
- detaro 9y agoVarious RISC-V emulators are available, e.g. you can run Linux on a simulated risc-v processor in qemu.
- rwmj 9y agoIndeed: http://oirase.annexia.org/riscv/ http://oirase.annexia.org/riscv/
- rbanffy 9y agoTrue. I wonder how much of this board's hardware is emulated in there.
- rwmj 9y agoQuite a lot, see item 3 below: $ qemu-system-riscv64 -machine \? Supported machines are: none empty machine sifive_e300 RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive E300 SDK sifive_u500 RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive U500 SDK spike_v1.10 RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.10) spike_v1.9 RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.9.1) (default) virt RISC-V VirtIO Board (Privileged spec v1.10)
- microcolonel 9y agoI'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.
- faragon 9y agoFrom 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).
- Karrot_Kream 9y agoWhile I love the Pine64 concept, the crappy docs and closed graphics blobs means that Linux tends to have all sorts of weirdness, let alone BSD. I can't wait for a first-class open platform.
- faragon 9y agoSure. I would love to buy that RISC-V board. But 1000 USD is way too much. Anyway, it is not a bad start, e.g. exotic ARM dev boards are very expensive, too.
- nmca 9y agowoop woop! RISC-V is excellent and I hope this is the first of many!
- topspin 9y agoWhat 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.
- nickysielicki 9y agoLabels are the following: GEMGXLALTCLK PROCMON DDRCTRLALTCLK DDRPHYALTCLK DDR_ATB0 DDR_ATB1 DDR_PLL_TESTOUT_P DDR_PLL_TESTOUT_N These are just SoC debug headers. Eg: GEMGXL comes from Gigabit Ethernet MAC, and GXL is a marketing term from Cadence.
- topspin 9y agoSix appear to be test points for monitoring memory bus clocks.
- cmrdporcupine 9y agoSo 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?
- justinclift 9y agoThe FMC adapter item on the specs is an standardised interface adapter. Looking at the instructions for some of the previous dev kits points to an FMC PCIe module that seems like the right kind of thing: http://www.hitechglobal.com/FMCModules/FMC_PCIExpress.htm http://www.hitechglobal.com/FMCModules/FMC_PCIExpress.htm Obviously you'd want to check a bit more carefully. I'mjust pointing out that PCIe seems like it's a go-er with the hardware right now even. :)
- senatorobama 9y agoWhat's a good way to get involved in RISC-V
- ramshanker 9y agoMy 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.
- no_protocol 9y agoThe PCEngines APU2C0 is their most stripped down APU2 model, it's $99. https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c0.htm https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c0.htm Quad-core, 2GB RAM, 2x Gigabit Ethernet, m-SATA, 12V DC power No audio port, no HDMI port, this model leaves off the GPIO headers, no camera, 2 total USB ports, 1 MicroSD connector. It's about $99 and the case is another $10. I have several.
- lazyjones 9y agoThe Banana Pi M2 Berry fits the bill, unless you mind all the extra stuff it has. http://www.banana-pi.org/m2ub.html http://www.banana-pi.org/m2ub.html (Costs around $40: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-products-BPI-M2-Berry-with-BPI-M2-Ultra-Pin-to-Pin-compatibility-is-same-size/302756_32823650244.html?spm=2114.12010612.0.0.1a8997ebncS2n2 https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-products-BPI-M2...)
- Quequau 9y agoWhat do you think of the new stuff from HardKernel?
- ramshanker 9y agoAwesome. Thanks. ODROID-HC2 is on top of my list now. Waiting for my local retailer to catchup!
- garmaine 9y agoWhat does that have to do with this?
- fithisux 9y agoPUN MODE ON HiFive is the cheapest non-vaporware upgrade path for Amiga enthusiasts (if they bring their own AGA GFX) PUN MODE OFF
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]