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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 th
by throwaway2048 9y ago
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.
- garmaine 9y agoI'm not sure there will be cheaper boards, to be honest. Just more fully functional ones with more peripheral types and added features I'm sure. This is a workstation-class CPU they are developing, not a RasPi competitor.
- nickik 9y agoThere are tons of other people who are working on RISC-V as well, LowRISC for example. The software should run everywhere.
- garmaine 9y agoI’m talking about the Freedom Unleashes platform from SiFive.
- qubex 9y agoI’m curious to know what leads you to consider the RISC-V to be a “workstation-class CPU”. As I understand it’s an ISA that aims to be pretty broad, and is expected to compete (at least initially) with low-end embedded MIPS chips that are pretty ubiquitous everywhere in all sorts of devices.
- garmaine 9y agoI’m talking about U54 from SiFive specifically.
- jabl 9y agoThe U54 is a single-issue in-order core. Again, what makes you label that a "workstation-class core"?
- garmaine 9y agoThe company's stated plans for the product line.
- jabl 9y agoHmm, my google-fu seems to be failing me, do you have a link where the company states that?
- garmaine 9y agoNo, I’ve learned about SiFive from the talks they’ve given at the RISC-V workshops. I think some of those are recorded, maybe look there? I’m on mobile and it’s hard to provide a link.
- qubex 9y agoWell... this certainly isn’t workstation-class performance. This is more like a smartphone SoC.
- opencl 9y agoThe U54 is squarely in the Pi competitor category. Claimed IPC is slightly lower at 1.7DMIPS/Mhz vs 2.3 for the Cortex-A53 in the Pi and this SoC clocks slightly higher than the Pi at 1.5Ghz vs 1.2Ghz, so performance should be quite similar. I certainly hope it manages to catch on and we get higher performance RISC-V chips at a reasonable cost in the future but these are clearly not it. If by "workstation class" you mean Skylake/Zen levels of performance there's a long way to go.
- Jedd 9y ago> I'm not sure there will be cheaper boards, to be honest. a) No need to assert honesty - we assume everyone is trying to be honest with each other here. b) History is littered with people believing or claiming that some thing can not possibly become smaller / cheaper / faster ... it's a dangerous predictive path to wander, with basically no recorded precedents to cite.