10 ms·
Building a RISC-V PC
- shadeslayer 8y agoI saw one of these at FOSDEM recently and it could already run a full Linux graphics stack all the way to KDE Plasma. So cool :D
- snazz 8y agoI had heard of the SiFive/HiFive Unleashed, but not of the expansion board. I’m surprised that it “just worked” and I really like the case!
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoThe article didn't mention that the development board costs 1000 USD and the expansion board costs another 2000 USD, and it's only a barebone system, a full system comparable to a high-performance PC would require another 500 USD. At this price level (~3000+USD), one can almost purchase an OpenPOWER-based workstation (as we already have seen, the crowdfund campaign for Talos Secure Workstation failed due to its price, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-workstation&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-wo...). So no, I still don't think RISC-V is as usable as a PC for an average user at its current shape as a prototype for developers.
- Palomides 8y agoyou can get a nice, complete POWER9 desktop tower for $2,364.99 https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS3/intro.html https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS3/intro.html Probably more open, too.
- nickpsecurity 8y agoYou can download a lot of the RISC-V's source to use in FPGA's or your own hardware. Nobody has given me a link to the same for POWER9. There's also a lower risk of getting patent sued for selling RISC-V versus IBM's I.P.. I'd say POWER9 is nowhere near as open as the RISC-V offering. It's "open" like OpenVMS: using the word to get dollars more than maximizing openness.
- Palomides 8y agoI meant open regarding the hardware, bootloader, etc., but it seems like sifive has released more code since I last looked and you can now bring up a board without any blobs. And yeah, we won't be seeing openpower on FPGAs anytime soon.
- rwmj 8y agoIt "just worked" thanks to huge amounts of work by folk from WDC, SiFive, Microsemi, Fedora, and Debian.
- microcolonel 8y agoI want to get back to porting Chromium, because when AMD tries the second time around [0] (edit: maybe third time around, as wmf below points out) to do a pin-compatible RISC (maybe this time it's one of the Zen 4 platforms or whatever), I want to pop the phattest GPU in that thing and enjoy. [0]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-skybridge-new-arm-and-x86-chips-that-are-pin-compatible https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-sk...
- wolfgke 8y ago> because when AMD tries the second time around [0] to do a pin-compatible RISC (maybe this time it's one of the Zen 4 platforms or whatever), [...] > [0]: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-skybridge-new-arm-and-x86-chips-that-are-pin-compatible https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-sk... The mentioned Project Skybridge is dead: https://wccftech.com/amd-cancelled-skybridge-glofo-terminated-20nm/ https://wccftech.com/amd-cancelled-skybridge-glofo-terminate...
- microcolonel 8y agoThat's why I said tries the second time around, not succeeds yet again.
- wolfgke 8y ago> That's why I said tries the second time around, not succeeds yet again. OK, point taken. But do you have evidence that AMD has plans to do a second attempt?
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoThat's beautiful. Did it fall through?
- microcolonel 8y agoAs wolfgke pointed out, yeah. They claim that it was because of issues with the availability of the process they intended to manufacture on, and I'd sure like to believe that that was all it was.
- agumonkey 8y agomicrosemi logo looks sooo much like a 90s MSDN/Office one I took 10 seconds to be sure if it was MICROSOFT or not
- rnvhhynr 8y agoWhy a video instead of text + photos?
- chrisseaton 8y agoI don't know what you mean - the article looks to me like text and photos, and then a short video as well.
- silur 8y agoI'm a big fan of RISC-V but HiFive completely ruined the whole point. I was excited for a _proper_ open ISA because it would open up super low cost hardware development. But looking at the $35 raspberry pi with a license-bound ARM ISA and a supposedly open source board for $1000 it looks like HiFive is playing by intel's or ARM's rules. No chance for risc-v adoption with this ridiculous overpricing
- makapuf 8y agoSince HiFive is to my knowledge the only ones producing such kind of silicon chips with this instruction set, it is infinitely cheaper than other options, reducing the average price by NaN. I fail to see how more supply for an open architecture raises prices.
- wmf 8y agoMany people are in for a rude awakening when they realize that a free ISA saves them like 1% or less of system cost. It certainly can't overcome the ~10x cost difference between a low-volume prototype board and a mass-produced board. RPi also kind of ruined the hardware world because AFAIK the SoC was being dumped below cost; I'm not sure if that's still true.
- jandrese 8y agoHard to imagine that the SoC is still being dumped after all of these years, if it even was in the first place. If the purpose was to kill off the grossly overpriced PC104 market, mission accomplished. The fact that those boards have spawned a zillion competitors seems to suggest that any further dumping is not having the desired effect. A free ISA is about more than saving a few pennies on each board in royalties, it's about having a chip you can truly trust. One that doesn't have some opaque binary blob running at ring -2. One where nothing is encrypted by a key only the manufacturer (and whomever they can strike a deal with) has. About hardware you truly own and control.
- wmf 8y agoit's about having a chip you can truly trust This gets repeated over and over but I don't get it. You could build a blob-free ARM chip. Existing RISC-V chips already have/had blobs. Freeeeedom is orthogonal to the ISA.
- dfed-mpls 8y ago"RISC architecture is gonna change everything."
- wmf 8y agoFifth time's the charm.
- dfed-mpls 8y agohence the quotes.
- mindcrime 8y agoFYI man, alright. You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!
- TomVDB 8y agoOut in the real world, I know of cases where proprietary CPU or DSP IP was rejected in favor of RISC-V alternatives. RISC-V may not change everything, but I do believe that it will change on thing in a major way: the financials of CPU IP such as Tensilica, Cortex-M0, ARC etc. There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal. Edit: in the maker world, the so-called Blue Pill is incredibly popular. It has an STM32F103 SOC with a 72MHz Cortex M3 and tons of digital and analog interfaces. On AliExpress, these boards go for $1.60 a piece! https://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill https://wiki.stm32duino.com/index.php?title=Blue_Pill
- MisterTea 8y ago> There is very little friction in replacing embedded controllers that are not customer facing. And that's a market were $0.01 in licensing fees can be a big deal. Reminds me of USB vs Firewire. Firewire was the superior of the two yet it lost. Why? USB didn't have Fw's $0.25 licensing fee per manufactured device.
- gmueckl 8y agoNow if the HiFive could be scaled uo to match the performance of a current x86 CPU, this might become a serious contender for a decent set of applications.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoIt doesn't need to hit the same perf as high-end x86 to be useful for a lot of uses; observe the sheer number of IoT projects run on Raspberry Pi and the like. Now, of course, I think we all would like to see high-end riscv be a thing so we can ditch x86 in that market segment too.
- rbanffy 8y agoIt needs to have a better performance per dollar, however, or its not a great option.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wolfgke 8y ago> It needs to have a better performance per dollar I am not sure whether this will ever come.
- rbanffy 8y agoIt came, went, and came again for ARM. On complete mainstream systems, however, the price of the CPU will be a relatively small fraction of the total BOM.
- brucehoult 8y agoIt's an early-access prototype for engineers to use to develop software for the cheap products that will come in the next year or two. It's not intended for hobbyists.
- 8y ago
- mrtweetyhack 8y agoIntel loves RISC-V because it is biting ARM 's ankle but one day, it will grow to bite Intel, AMD, IBM, and even Nvidia.
- x15 8y agoA great interview on the first Linux port on RISC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZMA3Ge144U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZMA3Ge144U
- Timothycquinn 8y agoAnybody have an idea what the BOM cost is of this build?
- baobrien 8y agoThe Risc-V board was about $1000 the last time I checked, and the microsemi expansion thing was $2000. The SiFive board is for a small run development chip and the microsemi has a big honkin' FPGA, so the prices aren't unreasonable for that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- avisaven 8y agoIf you want to play with RISC-V hardware right now, I highly recommend taking a look at the Sipeed MAIX [1]. It has a bunch of neat features along with a dedicated RISC-V processor, for a considerably lower price (~$35 if my memory is correct). I've received a M1w, which is working quite well. The campaign has ended but it seems you can get the hardware on external retailers, however I cannot vouch for these [2]. They also have a Telegram chat where the developers of the product talk quite a bit, and if you ever have any questions they're quite responsive and helpful. [1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sipeed-maix-the-world-first-risc-v-64-ai-module https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sipeed-maix-the-world-fir... [2] https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-MAIX-I-module-WiFi-version-1st-RISC-V-64-AI-Module-K210-insid-p-3206.html https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-MAIX-I-module-WiFi-versio...
- krasin 8y agoAdditional info could be found at the SoC manufacturer website and their Github ([1], [2]). As an additional insight: this is an offspring of one of the developers of mining hardware, Canaan. They have released the chip right before their anticipated IPO: https://coingeek.com/crypto-miner-maker-canaan-eyes-going-public-new-york-report/ https://coingeek.com/crypto-miner-maker-canaan-eyes-going-pu... 1. https://kendryte.com/ https://kendryte.com/ 2. https://github.com/kendryte https://github.com/kendryte
- listic 8y agohardcore FFT !
- jokr004 8y agoI just got my hands on one of these through the indiegogo campaign. Really cool! I just got micropython running, going to sit down with it this weekend
- tachyonbeam 8y agoHow does the quad-core 64-bit RISC-V processor used perform? Genuinely curious to know how to compares to a modern ARM cellphone chip, for example.
- rwmj 8y agoI have two of these boards which are part of the Fedora build system (see http://fedora.riscv.rocks/koji/ http://fedora.riscv.rocks/koji/). The performance is fine for light development, but they're not blazingly fast -- and we don't expect that, it's the first development board available only in small quantities. The chip itself is an in-order design, something like the A53.
- mwcampbell 8y agoIf you can take one of those boards off of build duty for long enough (maybe half an hour?), it would be interesting to see the results of a UnixBench [1] run. [1]: https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench
- zamadatix 8y agohttps://openbenchmarking.org/s/SiFive https://openbenchmarking.org/s/SiFive
- echofavor 8y agoThanks for sharing. You can also share your ideas for free on www.echofavor.com
- mrweasel 8y agoIs there some reason for the "funny" form factor of the HiFive boards? It seems like a mini-ITX or ATX form factor would be more appealing to many.
- justinclift 8y agoProbably because it's a development board in spirit, not really intended for any kind of PC usage. Hopefully some future product(s) with more PC compatible form factors come out in the next few years. :)
- VoxPelli 8y agoOne of the amazing possibilities with RISC-V will be how it democratizes chip designing and by that opens up the ability to innovate in an area of computing that so far has been reserved to a selected few. RISC-V isn't really about price or performance – it's about innovation, agility, exploration and new frontiers.
- justinclift 8y agoUsing some right angle PCIe connectors for the graphics and USB expansion cards, they'd probably be able to shrink the height of that case significantly.