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RISC-V HiFive Premier P550 Development Boards with Ubuntu Now Available
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoCan someone who is more familiar with this SoC confirm for me that this P550 doesn't have the RISC-V "V" vector extensions? I'm seeing a GBC suffix which I guess means bit manipulation, compressed instructions, and whatever the G extension is which I don't fully understand (IMAFD plz explain?)
- insom 2y agoG includes MAFD extensions for non-embedded (I) applications. That's multiplication and division, atomics, single and double-precision floating point. It also includes the control/status register and a instruction-fence instruction. I think it's there to mean "the base plus the standard bits that people generally want in a processor if they're writing C for it".
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoAh, ok, thanks for the clarification. When I last played with RISC-V it was in (hobby) FPGA stuff and the cores I was messing with did not specify G.
- lauriewired 2y agoP550 cores don't have vector extensions. It's actually quite an old design, from 2021. What you'd want is SiFive P670 cores, which are RVA22 compliant with the vector 1.0 spec.
- brucehoult 2y agoThree years from announcement of a core to SoCs on boards being available is actually on the quick side. Arm A53 (Pi 3, October 2012 - February 2016), A72 (Pi 4, Feb 2015 - June 2019), and A76 (Pi 5, May 2018 - September 2023, or January 2022 for Radxa Rock 5B) all took longer. P670 was only announced in November 2022. If a board ships by the end of 2025 it will be doing very well.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agowhy does it take so long? I totally understand for leading edge products on new nodes why it would, but for chips on mature processes, what's the bottleneck between design and sale? I know the round trip time from the foundries is ~3 months. Is the rest validation? It feels like it would be really valuable to be able to reduce the time to ~1 year (even if that came at the cost of power, area or a moderate amount of performance). Shortening the feedback loop here would be super helpful for designers and programmers to be able to experiment with new paradigms faster I would think.
- brucehoult 2y agoLargely because in the Arm and RISC-V worlds company A designs the CPU core, then at some point company B decides to license the core to make an SoC and starts designing it. Then company C manufactures the chip. Then when the chip is available companies D, E, F design boards for the chip to go on. Traditionally in x86 Intel and AMD do all the first three steps in one company, with the stages overlapped, and feedback. Also, Intel and AMD (and even more so Apple) don't announce a new chip until it is very close to shipping. They might have been working on it internally for five years before that. Arm and RISC-V companies have to make public announcements when a core is nearing design completion, to give a chance for companies such as Allwinner and Rockchip and Broadcom and Mediatek and Sophgo and Starfive to take a look at the specs and decide that it might be interesting to build a chip using that core. > I know the round trip time from the foundries is ~3 months. That's only if the chip works first time. Many don't and need several re-spins. I believe 3 or 4 is not uncommon. And variable amounts of re-design and re-layout and re-verify time between each of those ~3 months at the foundry. Given that, it would be a brave company that went straight to mass-production without a round of test chips first, so you've got 2x ~3 months, plus "bring up" time in between, even in the best case.
- aseipp 2y agoThe only board that is cheap and available with the ratified 1.0 vector extension I know of is the Kendryte K230, which you can find on some boards for about $40 USD: https://developer.canaan-creative.com/k230/dev/zh/00_hardware/K230_datasheet.html https://developer.canaan-creative.com/k230/dev/zh/00_hardwar... Note that it's only on one 1.6GHz core, and still pretty anemic otherwise (pi form factor, it's to be expected.) So something "deskop grade" with all the nice extensions and other goodies is probably still a ways off. Maybe next year; we'll have to see -- but lots of useful extensions continue to be ratified today, so it may still be a while before things "cool off."
- mshockwave 2y agoSpacemiT K1 on BananaPi is another commonly seen RVV 1.0 capable chip. IIRC both Kendryte K230 and SpacemiT K1 are in-order cores.
- 6SixTy 2y agoit takes time (~2 years) for silicon designers to go from idea to taping out silicon. The P550's cores are advertised as having good area efficiency, so it could be both getting rid of the vector extensions to optimize area and they just couldn't incorporate them into the design. I is the base integer instructions M is integer multiplication A is atomic F is single precision float D is double precision G is shorthand for all of the above + 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do
- mshockwave 2y ago> 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do CSR (i.e. status) register and instruction fence extensions. Instruction fences are most useful in cases where you modify text section during runtime (e.g. JIT or code hot reload) such that you need to ensure the consistency of code across different harts
- jecel 2y ago> + 2 others that I honestly have no idea what they do The original RV32I and RV64I required some control registers for high frequency counters and instruction counters. You also needed the instructions to access these registers. This proved to be too complex for the simplest implementations, so recently (five years ago?) this functionality has been moved to their own extensions. Including these extensions in G makes the current G have the same functionality as the original G.
- snvzz 2y agoImportant to highlight this happened before the base RISC-V specs were ratified. i.e. features have not been removed after ratification.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoOk, wow I didn't even clue in that the IMAFD was other extensions, and the G a "rollup" of them, because last time I played with RISC-V it was just with cores that did IMF
- haunter 2y ago$400 (16GB DDR5) and $500 (32GB DDR5) because that's not in the blog post. But I have some questions: Why the weird form factor? Mini-DTX is supported by a lot of cases but as a motherboard form factor it's incredibly niche compared to Mini-ITX and especially Micro-ATX. Edit: DTX supposed to be an open standard but it's already a "dead" platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTX_(form_factor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTX_(form_factor) Why the eMMC? There is an M.2 E key but that's for wireless connection only. Is it a platform limitation that M.2 SSDs can't be used?
- MobiusHorizons 2y ago> Why the eMMC? There is an M.2 E key but that's for wireless connection only. Is it a platform limitation that M.2 SSDs can't be used? Presumably very limited pcie bandwidth. You should think of this more like a raspberry pi than a pc motherboard. E key slots typically provide 1 lane of pcie 2.0 (even on systems with 3.0 available), while m.2 is 4 lanes and frequently faster pcie 3.0
- haunter 2y ago> You should think of this more like a raspberry pi than a pc motherboard Thanks that makes perfectly sense! I kind of want to buy one now (too bad single 32GB boards can't be bought, minimum order is 256)
- MobiusHorizons 2y agoJust checked: looks like it does provide a full size pcie slot. My guess is that the intended use case is for developers testing compatibility. You could almost certainly plug in an nvme drive through an adapter to that full size slot (although booting from it would likely require a custom uboot build) but if you use up the one slot for storage, you can’t plug in any other peripherals to test.
- phire 2y agoIt's a 16x slot, but it only provides 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0 Appears to be a SoC limitation, which only has a single 4x PCIe 3.0 interface, and doesn't appear to support bifurcation (splitting into two 2x slots, or four 4x slots). You could probably throw a PCIe switch on it, but PCIe switches are expensive. The SoC wasn't designed for this product, it was designed by 3rd party company for computer vision/robotics/manufacturing use cases.
- rwmj 2y agoI benchmarked these against a few other RISC-V boards. They're pretty fast, relative to RISC-V (although not relative to x86): https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-spacemit-x60-and-others/ https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/benchmarking-risc-v-sp... Note the benchmark is not very rigorous, but it reflects what we want to do with these boards which is to build Fedora packages.
- jeffbee 2y agoWhy can't the packages be cross-compiled on a platform with reasonable performance?
- pabs3 2y agoThe experience of the Debian folks working on cross-compiling is that ~50% of packages are cross-compilable, and that was only achieved with a lot of work and a lot of patches merged. Also, it regresses quite a lot. https://crossqa.debian.net/ https://crossqa.debian.net/
- ahoka 2y agoNot everything can be easily cross compiled, unfortunately.
- boredatoms 2y agoIts also just plain annoying to configure in many cases
- rwmj 2y agoThere's a lot of cases where you want to build something and run it afterwards, such as tests or intermediate tooling used in later steps in the build. In any case, I actually want to use RISC-V machines for my development environment.
- fweimer 2y agoThe goal is to actually run RISC-V binaries on RISC-V hardware, to see what works and what doesn't. You wouldn't spot code generations bugs like this one if you merely cross-compile and never run the binaries: https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commitdiff;h=c65046ff2ef0a9a46e59bc0b3369b2d226f6a239 https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commitdiff;h=c65046ff2e... For quite some time to come, the main user of the Fedora riscv64 port will be the Fedora riscv64 builders. With cross-compilation, we wouldn't even have that limited use of the binaries produced.
- hoistbypetard 2y ago"Now Available" must mean something different to SiFive than it does to me. When I click the links in the press release that purport to let me acquire one, they all say "No Stock Available," which means the opposite of "Now Available" to me. They weren't loading at all earlier, though, so saying that I can't get one but showing me the price I can't get it at is some kind of improvement, I guess.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agopresumably that means that they had stock and then sold through all of it basically instantly.
- brucehoult 2y ago32 GB is out of stock. 16 GB (which is enough for a quad core, IMO) is $399 with "375 in stock, ships tomorrow" https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc I ordered a Milk-V Megrez (same ship but 1.8 GHz vs 1.4 GHz here) for $100 less a week ago. The price difference was much bigger then!
- hoistbypetard 2y agoNice. When I looked, the page took forever to load and said 16GB was out of stock as well. I'm tempted by the 16GB board.
- brucehoult 2y agoRight now, the 16 GB page is saying "368 parts: Ships tomorrow". SO that's 7 sold since my previous message. Unless they sold all 375 from yesterday and have restocked since your message. Which strikes me as unlikely.
- ericpruitt 2y agoSiFive sent out an email on about the 32GB boards: > The Grinch struck a little early this year. While the 16GB HIFive Premier P550 boards are in stock at Arrow.com and available now we were so excited to tell you the news we pushed the send button too soon. If you tried to order a 32GB board after yesterday's announcement our distributor is not quite ready. Our sincerest apologies to any of you who experienced difficulties and for multiple emails. We expect this problem to be solved in the next few days and we will send an update as soon as the 32GB boards are available. Thank you for your patience.
- sedatk 2y agoDon’t capitalize every word in a title. I thought “Ubuntu Now” was a technology that I didn’t know about.
- worik 2y ago> Don’t capitalize every word in a title It is what they taught me to do at school. So I do it still
- stonogo 2y agoCan it run a vanilla kernel or is it nailed forever to Sifive's Dev team?
- rwmj 2y agoIt can't run an upstream kernel yet, although it's very likely that we'll get there. SiFive have in the past been very good about getting changes upstream.
- minroot 2y agoWhy is Ubuntu always the choice, why not fedora or opensuse?
- Octoth0rpe 2y agoIn some sense, this question answers itself: the most important distro to support is the most popular distro in the space.
- ZiiS 2y agoBecause Canonical invested in it and they didn't.
- taffronaut 2y agoUbuntu has historically had a business model that is more open to supporting out-of-tree kernel patches
- infamouscow 2y agoI can think of two reasons: 1. Ubuntu invested very heavily into making Linux friendly to a whole generation of makers when nobody else was. Ubuntu is most familiar to them. Canonical will benefit from that investment for the foreseeable future. 2. Ubuntu benefits from Debian's debootstrap which makes porting to a new architecture substantially easier.
- pabs3 2y agodebootstrap (or mmdebstrap) is just for installing the already existing binary packages. The bootstrap process for bringing up a new port is a lot more work. https://wiki.debian.org/SystemBuildTools https://wiki.debian.org/SystemBuildTools https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V https://wiki.debian.org/RISC-V The reason why Ubuntu is probably that they are a commercial vendor so you can make contracts with them, while the likes of Debian just work on what they care about when they have time.
- someone10492 2y agoBecause Debian has been one of the first distributions supporting RISC-V and ubuntu is simply using packages from it.
- yuumei 2y agoThe last SiFive board I had died after about a year of use and is no longer supported so buyer beware
- AshleysBrain 2y agoDoes anyone know if any browsers have Ubuntu RISC-V ports? Chromium or Firefox perhaps? Might be interesting to give it a spin.
- pabs3 2y agoFirefox is on Debian riscv64, but Chromium is a lot less portable, and IIRC often rejects portability patches. https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=firefox%2desr https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=firefox%2desr https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=chromium https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=chromium
- rwmj 2y agoFirefox has been able to run on RISC-V for as long as I can remember. I'm pretty sure I remember SiFive doing a demo back in 2018 at FOSDEM which included the browser. However generally GUI environments are still quite slow, so it won't be very usable. Edit: This one I think: https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/ but I can only see them running Quake, not Firefox.
- drmpeg 2y agoThe latest Ubuntu image for the P550 has Firefox installed. https://github.com/sifive/hifive-premier-p550-ubuntu/blob/master/ReleaseNotes/2024.11.00.md https://github.com/sifive/hifive-premier-p550-ubuntu/blob/ma...
- boredatoms 2y agoI hope they can put out an RVA23 level board soon
- brucehoult 2y agoThe RVA23 spec was only published in October. It'll be 2 or 3 years before finished products are on sale.
- knorker 2y agoRV64GBC, so still no vector instructions? Does anyone know if there's a den board / soc that does the V set yet?
- OrvalWintermute 2y agoYou can get vectorized instructions from Microchip at a much higher price point in a few months on RISCV with the forthcoming $1500ish Devboard - it has some nice specs, 10GigE https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64hx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... This is similar to the High Performance Space Computer which will be coming out in Rad Hardened & Rad Tolerant versions, I think these devboards will be 40k-60k https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64-hpsc https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... There is also a lower end 4 core unit too, list price for the devkit is $150, currently shipping. https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64gx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-...
- camel-cdr 2y agoWhere did you get the $1500? That's an insane price for something which will perform similarly to the BPI-F3. It has double the DLEN, but it also only runs at 1GHz, while the BPI-F3 is available at 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz for way cheaper. > There is also a lower end 4 core unit too, list price for the devkit is $150, currently shipping. This is an entirely different processor, the now very old SiFive U54 at 0.6GHz.
- OrvalWintermute 2y agoApologies, I was incorrect. The price is $2895 listed, which is still a great deal.
- knorker 2y agoThe latter seems to only be RV64GC, meaning no vector instructions, right? Your first link though, based on PIC64HX, seems to be what I'm waiting for. I'll keep an eye on it. Thanks!
- spintin 2y ago[dead]
- ThinkBeat 2y agoI get that RISC-V is exciting as an open-source phenomena, but that is a pretty expensive piece of kit. Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM or Intel processors at the same price level? Or more performance per watt? Or an instructino set that makes a lot of operation super fast? What is the upside?
- eightysixfour 2y agoOpen source, open ISA, embedded systems. That’s it. We are still years away from boards where they are interesting to people who are only interested in laptop or higher performance classes.
- brucehoult 2y agoSiFive's boards are always more expensive than 3rd party boards using the same CPU cores. They are aimed primarily at SiFive IP customers who are designing their own chips, to develop software on before their chips are ready. > Is this in par with or faster than comparable ARM, ADM or Intel processors at the same price level? rwjm's package build benchmark shows it as 25% faster than a comparable µarch Raspberry Pi 4. It's been some time since Intel or AMD had similar products: I guess something around Pentium III, Pentium M, or early Core 2. Prices are a function of production volume (and features / quality, but mostly volume). The Pi 4 is if course a mass-market product and is cheaper. Arm's own "Juno" A72 dev board is $10,000, which is 20x more than this SiFive board. https://www.elementsearch.com/arm-v2m-juno-0317d-evaluation-boards-embedded-mcu-dsp https://www.elementsearch.com/arm-v2m-juno-0317d-evaluation-... > What is the upside? It (and Sipeed, Pine64, Milk-V boards with the same SoC) is the fastest RISC-V hardware, per core, currently available. The $2500 Milk-V Pioneer is overall faster due to having 64 cores (and 128 GB RAM, 32 PCIe lanes), but is slightly slower per core. You buy these early dev boards because you want or need RISC-V for some reason, not because you want the cheapest fastest hardware of any kind.
- jjrh 2y agoNot an unreasonable price for a dev board. The key part is 'dev' - it's for people doing development on the platform.
- MisterTea 2y agoHuh. Its only 17:45 EST and Arrow is already sold out.
- haunter 2y ago16GB is available https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc (375 in stock)
- brucehoult 2y agoNote that the link in the announcement takes you to the 32 GB, which is (instantly?) out of stock. 16 GB (which is enough for a quad core, IMO) is $399 with "375 in stock, ships tomorrow" https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc https://www.arrow.com/en/products/hf106/sifive-inc I ordered a Milk-V Megrez (same SoC but 1.8 GHz vs 1.4 GHz here) for $100 less a week ago. The price difference was much bigger then!
- brucehoult 2y agoOops! $200 less ... $199 for the 16 GB. And supposedly faster. Also the Megrez can be powered from a standard 12V barrel connector if you don't want to put it in a case / use an ATX power supply.
- pjmlp 2y agoSo the cool stuff "currently not supported in software", as usual in Linux workloads. If I am paying for this with Ubuntu pre-installed, the very least is to fully support the hardware they are trying to sell.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2y agoLinux not even mentioned once, it is Ubuntu®© Who is their target audience? definitely not me