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The Heart of RISC-V Development Is Unmatched
- guerby 6y agoAlso here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sifive-riscv-unmatched&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sifive-r...
- Sphax 6y agoAnyone know if they ship to Europe ? Or if there's a reseller in Europe.
- rwmj 6y agoYes, they are being distributed by Mouser.
- diarmuidc 6y agoI've a PolarFire SOC eval board on my desk at the moment. 4x U54 cores. Only started to play with it but lots of kernel panics so far. Not sure where the issue is just yet but hopefully it'll get more stable over the next year
- snvzz 6y agoIf only if they had support on the open FPGA stack (yosys+nextpnr), it'd get one in an eyeblink. Alas, I'll have to settle for softcores on ECP5.
- aseipp 6y agoThe Polarfire SOC is a very neat, powerful series of chips — I also have an Icicle board and have some plans for it — but the Unleashed is definitely a better purchase unless you have plans on utilizing the FPGA, just from the spec sheets. The Polarfire chip is pretty darn cool on its own though...
- giomasce 6y agoWow! Things are really making progress in RISCV land!
- rektide 6y agoForewarning, comparing across utterly different segments of devices is bad & dangerous for the health of industries. And yet, let's dive in to just that: there's a lot more I/O than an RPi4 here! 8+4+1 PCIe 3.0 slots. Wow. If it can really use the bandwidth these slots expose that's very impressive. 4 USB ports but so few folks clarify whether that's for real or shared bandwidth under a single usb host or whether they're independent. So either an effective +1.25 or +5 extra PCIe3 slots of bandwidth there, again, if this device can saturate those links. I'm wondering very much how the CPU fares. This is progress either way, but will it match a RPi4? The RPI4 has tiny I/O but I feel like it's probable the cpu performance is not radically unlike.
- rwmj 6y agoI think Yunsup mentioned a small % performance improvement over the SiFive Unleashed. [EDIT I wrongly said the memory had doubled here - see correction in follow up comment] On the other hand the SiFive Unleashed was perfectly usable for general development use, even for use as a desktop.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoAgain RPi comparison isn't really what you'd do here. You have the freedom to put whatever GPU you want in there, it has NVME storage, etc. It would be interesting to benchmark this against a lower clocked x86 system. But it's kind of an odd comparison as this has 5 cores instead of the 2 cores typical in a low-end PC.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoNo HDMI, no wifi, $665. It's a nice product but the RISC-V Pi I was hoping for still isn't here.
- lsllc 6y agoGotta start somewhere and this is much more reasonable than the FPGA version @ $1K!
- rwmj 6y agoFPGA version was actually $3-4K. The previous $1K board was an ASIC produced in very small numbers.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoIt has PCIe slots for graphics, so of course no HDMI. This isn't a SoC-on-SBC type product like the RPi. The competitor here is a PC motherboard + CPU combination, not an RPi. Yes, it will be far slower than a new PC, but this is still pretty damn cool. To price compare you need to look at a 4+ core processor + modern motherboard + 8GB RAM + 32GB flash (EDIT: 32MB, so meh). I'm sure once you did that you'd find something half the price, but when you consider the volumes involved...
- elihu 6y agoMinor correction: the linked website says 32MB flash, not 32GB. Unless you meant 32GB flash for the micro-SD slot which is presumably sold separately for the SiFive board as it is with the RPi.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoOops, yeah, thanks for catching.
- justaguy88 6y agoIt's inevitable that someone will make a RISC-V Pi one day
- jeff-davis 6y agoIs this an early version of something that will be an end product? Or will it always be just for developers?
- 0xcde4c3db 6y agoI think that depends less on the device as it exists now and more on whether an OEM becomes interested in adapting it into a "real" product.
- rwmj 6y agoThis is mainly for developers, ie people porting their software and distributions to run on RISC-V, or doing builds, CI and similar.
- winter_blue 6y ago$665 is a bit too much for the specs they’ve offered. They should try to be price competitive instead of charging a premium. You can likely get a more powerful x86 system for less.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y agoThis is a dev board, not an end user product. As such it is reasonably priced.
- snvzz 6y agoI would hope for these to be sold at cost, and doubt they cost that much. Profits shouldn't come from scalping risc-v developers. I am hopeful some Chinese company will release something that will force some humility into the risc-v market. At least one candidate has been seen in the thread[0]. [0]: http://www.semimedia.cc/?p=7803 http://www.semimedia.cc/?p=7803
- justaguy88 6y agoEconomies of scale.
- mlyle 6y agoNot having reached enough developers and leading adopters means no market available except developers doing fundamental porting and experimentation. Targeted at developers doing fundamental porting means no volume. No volume means high prices. Low volume ASIC runs aren't cheap. Amortizing NRE costs of a complicated motherboard over dozens or hundreds of units ain't cheap either. It will sort itself out eventually, but the whole ecosystem has a big mountain to climb to get to where ARM is.
- TomVDB 6y ago“Scalping”? What are you talking about?
- rwmj 6y ago[Copying from the other item on this where I was answering a comment about why this is more expensive than a Raspberry Pi] You have to understand why the Raspberry Pi is priced the way it is: it's because it is a side effect of the massive production of Broadcom chips for tablets, phones, embedded, etc. Millions and millions are made. A relatively tiny number of these find their way into developer boards. The economies of scale mean they can be very cheap. RISC-V doesn't have this ... yet ... but there are several Chinese manufacturers currently making millions of chips for consumer devices with those going through foundries right now. So sooner or later the economics will work out for a "RISC-V Pi". I'd be surprised if it doesn't exist by 2022. For now this SiFive board is IMHO the best PC-like developer experience for RISC-V. [Disclaimer: Red Hat works with SiFive]
- _alex_ 6y agoI didn’t know riscv was making its way into consumer goods yet. Any examples you can share of places seeing riscv adoption?
- rwmj 6y agoAllWinner are one company that has publicly disclosed doing a large multi-million run of chips: http://www.semimedia.cc/?p=7803 http://www.semimedia.cc/?p=7803 It's not exactly clear from that announcement what they are going to use them for though. "industrial control, smart home, and consumer electronics" - that's everything :-)
- snvzz 6y agoThis is great news. If peripherals are the same or similar to those in their existing ARM SoC chips, we'd be close to full support on release thanks to the linux-sunxi project efforts[0] and similar efforts in netbsd. [0]: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort
- TomVDB 6y agoThey are in a lot of current Western Digital SSDs. Nvidia is known to have them in their GPUs in some form. I know of other consumer products where they are similarly used as embedded CPU, which is where RISC-V will be most prevalent in the coming years.
- snvzz 6y ago$666 is an improvement over $1k. It's still a core without V or B extensions, and still prohibitively expensive for anyone that doesn't need them. Useful for those working on risc-v ports, and that's about it.
- ddevault 6y agoThe price really isn't that outrageous. Consider the use-case: this is a mini-ITX form-factor with a standard power supply, M.2 slots, a PCIe adapter, etc. This is designed for desktop workstations. It comes with the CPU, motherboard, and RAM, all in one package. When you sum up the costs of those in your typical desktop PC workstation build, it's not really that far off.
- wmf 6y agoIt's very far off since this is slower and has fewer features than the worst motherboard ($60) and the worst CPU ($50) on the market. Add $30 worth of RAM and you're up to $140.
- ddevault 6y agoIt's also the first usable workstation for a novel open-source architecture. It's not as fast but that's a feature which, in my opinion, makes the price parity reasonable. Progress is gradual.
- snvzz 6y ago>It comes with the CPU, motherboard, and RAM, all in one package. Unfortunately, the RAM not being socketed means you're limited to 8GB, which disqualifies this machine as workstation. Low CPU performance is tolerable, system chocking on low RAM isn't. I'm suffering on a laptop that "only" has 16GB RAM, and this is despite minimizing the load by alternating between Sway and i3 depending on mood on boot. Editor, Browser (unavoidably heavy, with a ton of tabs open as part of the workflow), PDF viewer, Music player and little else. Everything is bloated these days. I don't see how 8GB can be tolerable as a workstation. It really is a deal breaker.
- snvzz 6y agoDoes anybody else find very unnerving that the CPU clocks are undisclosed? They can't be found anywhere. Not even the product brief[0]. [0]: https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/c05b8ddd-e043-45a6-8a29-2a137090236f_HiFive+Unmatched+Product+Brief+%28released%29.pdf https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/c05b8ddd-e043-45a6-8a29...
- rwmj 6y agoIt's 1 GHz [WRONG - see below], it was mentioned in the presentation. The Unleashed can be overclocked just by catting an entry in sysfs, I'm not sure if the same will apply here. EDIT: The clock speed I quoted above is WRONG. I'm on the breakout call now and they are NOT announcing clock speed at this time.
- snvzz 6y agoThat's good to know. At least that does ensure it's an ASIC, not an FPGA. Besides lack of V extension, I'm sad about the seemingly artificial limits (8GB RAM onboard instead of slots, so you can't easily make a workstation out of this) and the still outrageous price. I think that it has its market niche (developers working on risc-v ports), but most of us are better off trying RISC-V cores on an FPGA or emulator. I'm hoping China will solve the cheap RISC-V SoC situation by releasing some cheap chip SBCs can be built on, at some point soon. Lowrisc used to be all about doing that in an open hardware manner, but it seems the moment they got some funding, they got distracted into experiments (e.g. pointer validation stuff) that have little to do with achieving the original goal.
- rwmj 6y agoI can assure you it's certainly an ASIC, and so was the Unleashed. Their very early development version from ~2017 was an FPGA costing about $3-4K. Qemu's RISC-V emulation is excellent and if you have a fast CPU it's a reasonable enough development environment.
- FullyFunctional 6y ago
- phkahler 6y agoWhat would be a decent graphics card for this? I'm thinking something half height with no fan. Put that in a small enclosure. Could be a great dev/demo box.
- rwmj 6y agoAMD Radeon up to RX580 is known to be supported.
- 127 6y agoWill this lower the cost of manufacturing custom chips? Like fully manufactured PCB with components from JLCPCB is just a few bucks. Will the ASIC manufacturing process ever fall to that level?
- zachm0 6y agoUnlikely, manufacturing an ASIC is orders of magnitude more complex than manufacturing and assembling PCBs. At most this will reduce the price of whatever RISC-V chip is used on the board, and maybe increase the demand for more RISC-V chips in the future.
- jng 6y agoGoogle recently opened up a full 130nm ASIC design platform, including core cells, tools, etc... Google it, can't remember the name right now. They've even committed to manufacturing silicon for free for a few select open source / open hardware projects. I guess that's going to turn into some kind of low-cost shuttle in the near future. That's probably the biggest movement towards democratizing ASIC design the way that JLCPCB and others have democratized PCB manufacturing (and assembly, as you mention, although with a quite restricted selection of available parts). Kicad democratized PCB design and it's being successfully used for many projects these days.
- postit 6y agoI’ll love to see the next decade battle between arm and risc-v
- LockAndLol 6y agoDon't you mean NVIDIA vs RISC-V? ;)
- azhenley 6y agoA colleague of mine has been testing out all of the RISC-V chips he can get his hands on, including a few SiFive boards. He really likes them. Check out his free book if you are interested in understanding SiFive's boards or RISC-V in general: Making a RISC-V Operating System using Rust (https://osblog.stephenmarz.com/ https://osblog.stephenmarz.com/)
- scroot 6y agoThe RISC-V spec is clear and simple enough to work with even for a dolt like me. I have started a project to implement the instruction set in Smalltalk [1] (shameless plug), along with basic CPU simulation. Hopefully I'll be able to develop low level risc systems in this environment with decent debugging. [1] https://github.com/darth-cheney/safe-bet https://github.com/darth-cheney/safe-bet
- wtroughton 6y ago> For debugging and monitoring, developers can access the console output of the board through the built-in microUSB type-B connector. As a software developer who's interested in this but has no experience with low-level hardware interface, how does one debug with the microUSB connector? What displays the console output?
- timidger 6y agoAs a software developer that, at one point in a job, was forced to confront hardware head on because the code I was writing was firmware, I'm guessing they mean something like Kermit. A simple tool to get the output from an embedded device.
- luismarques 6y agoIt's just exposes a UART (serial port) to USB device. With the right driver you'll get a serial port (ttyUSB, COM port, etc.) in your OS/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ezconnect 6y agoThe USB acts as a serial interface that spits out a lot of text for you to consume. They probably have a dedicated core for debugging on the silicon.
- fulafel 6y agoIt shows up as a "USB serial" device, a USB standard for emulating RS232 serial ports. Not to be confused with the S in USB :) You can use a terminal program, or eg GNU Screen, on the /dev/tty?? device on Unixy systems (COM ports on Windows).
- qwerty456127 6y agoWhat distros can I install on such a device? Are there Firefox, LibreOffice, VLC, ScummVM and Python 3 ports available?
- gspr 6y agoJudging from Debian: - Firefox: not quite, but the hurdle is minor, see below. Will be fixed when there's a demand. - LibreOffice: no. - VLC: yes. - ScummVM: builds, but fails 1 of 279 tests. Hopefully soon? - Python 3: Yes. I'll find the relevant Firefox email thread for you.
- qwerty456127 6y agoCool, thank you. You can probably see what I mean: if everything from this list works fine it makes a desktop computer sufficient for me and many other people. I imply most of the classic text-mode tools already work or can be ported with little difficulty. I've forgotten to mention Visual Studio Code but I understand it's going to be slightly harder, it hasn't been long since we've gotten an ARM port.
- gspr 6y agoSorry, I forgot to update you on the Firefox situation: https://lists.debian.org/debian-riscv/2020/01/msg00000.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-riscv/2020/01/msg00000.html
- ashleysmithgpu 6y agoI wonder if there are any binary blobs required to boot? I guess the WiFi/Bluetooth modules would be the main problem but those are removable