4 ms·
At £500+ it's not a realistic prospect I'm afraid. Maybe if there more affordable ones that becomes available then I definitely would want to take a look in-dep
by mrlonglong 5y ago
At £500+ it's not a realistic prospect I'm afraid. Maybe if there more affordable ones that becomes available then I definitely would want to take a look in-depth.
- baobrien 5y agoAFAIK, SiFives business is about selling their RISC-V cores and ASIC consulting services. RISC-V is still kind of new as far as hard silicon Linux-capable cores go. My understanding is that this thing is meant to serve as a dev kit for their U74 core and U740 SoC platform, provide hardware for interested-enough Linux kernel devs and distro maintainers, and serve as a real, up-for-sale RISC-V board with a real SoC, 'all the fixins', and no FPGA. That's to say it's not a board for people who'd otherwise buy a RasPI or slightly more expensive SBC -- It's closer to a proof of concept.
- rbanffy 5y agoWe’ve been through this here on HN. The board is designed around a chip that really wants to be a router. This is a bit expensive for a desktop workstation and will cater to people really determined to make this the year of the RISC-V desktop rather than the average developer, such as myself, who, while considering x86s disgusting, still buys them because they are cost-effective.
- rjsw 5y agoWhy do you feel this is optimized as a router, are you mixing it up with the SolidRun HoneyComb ARM system ?
- rbanffy 5y agoOops... I think I did. Sorry.
- threshold 5y agoWhy is X86 disgusting?
- mhh__ 5y agoUgly ugly ugly ISA. We throw away a little bit of performance and a lot of power because of how weird and old it is.
- infamouscow 5y agoIt's a matter of taste, but x86 has a lot of historical cruft because it's been around long enough to see 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit industry transitions. Off the top of my head, x86 memory segmentation and fragmentation between BIOS vs. UEFI and ACPI vs. the absence of device trees (AFAIK).
- mrlonglong 5y agoBut it is kinda cool to run software that originally was built for the 8088 on an AMD Threadripper. But yes, I do agree the x86 architecture is fast losing its lustre.
- lsllc 5y agoCheck out the Nezha D1 RISC-V SBC: https://hackerboards.com/boards/nezha/ https://hackerboards.com/boards/nezha/ Not sure how easy they are to get ... but $99 is a great price.
- rwmj 5y agoOne seller on AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=sipeed+nezha https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=sipeed+nezha These are very slow with limited RAM. It's possible to run Linux but it won't be much fun.
- pantalaimon 5y agoIs 1GiB considered 'little RAM' these days for an embedded board?
- cestith 5y agoPerhaps not for embedded, but it's being compared to a development board with 16 GB.
- rwmj 5y agoI actually thought the board above had only 512 MB, hence my comment, but even 1 GB is quite limiting. The HiFive Unleashed (previous SiFive board) has 8 GB and that is quite tight for some of the larger builds we do, or for doing parallel builds. The bigger problem with the board above is the single core.
- pantalaimon 5y agoWhy not cross-compile?
- ibotty 5y agoDistributions tend not to like cross-compiling, because it's not as flexible (how do you run test-programs?) and sometimes has bugs you don't have when native compiling.
- IshKebab 5y agoThat doesn't seem like an unreasonable price to me. Do you know of a cheaper alternative with the same performance?