
HiFive – RISC-V-based Linux development board - hucker
https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/
======
nickpsecurity
For those complaining about price, you might want to look into costs that go
into ASIC's. Adapteva has a nice write-up on that with their strategies for
getting cost down. Note that it was critical to have a few million with a
strategy that their own write-up said couldn't work if priced for consumer
market. They'd have to charge more or have ridiculous volume.

[http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/a-lean-fabless-
semicond...](http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/a-lean-fabless-
semiconductor-startup-model/)

The HiFive product uses a CPU they developed on 28nm. That's one of most
expensive nodes you can use. Depending on if and how they split cost, fabbing
those chips could've cost over a million dollars in masks. Low-volume, RISC
workstations used to cost five digits each on older nodes. Getting a low-
volume CPU on cutting-edge node for a grand is a great improvement. So long as
they ship products that work as claimed.

There's been a lot of vaporware in FOSS-type hardware...

~~~
wmf
Do those costs somehow not apply to ARM SoCs?

~~~
nickpsecurity
The rule of thumb is to not do an ASIC unless you're selling at least 100,000
units if you want it cheap per unit. The ARM SoC's that get used in a lot of
products probably are selling in really high volume. To illustrate the effect,
a product that cost $100,000 to design would break-even at $1 a unit in that
volume but $1,000 a unit if only 100 were sold. That's idealized: you
generally have to pay for the masks, a wafer per set of chips that fit on one
(number varies), absorb/charge the cost of broken chips, IC packaging for the
chips, shipping, storage, etc. That's not counting boards, assembly or
whatever.

So, selling something in high volume like big-name ARM's gets the prices way
down per unit. Getting to high volume is a marketing and product development
problem more than a technical one. Good luck on the startup. :) The ecosystem
benefits will give ARM-based solutions an advantage there for a while into the
future. The RISC-V chips will cost more due to lower volume unless all the
heavy costs are absorbed at a loss by whoever builds them. I've recommended
Universities or foundations attempt that to get good, FOSS chips started on
good nodes with them sold at material, assembly, and distribution cost from
there.

OpenPITON is another one with potential since they have prototypes for
32-core, OpenSPARC CPU's at 32nm. Leon3 GPL was an older one in SPARC. J2
(SuperH-style) is a compact one that's about 3 cents a core in 180nm with who
knows what performance, energy usage and pricing could be achieved at
28nm-32nm. CHERI, a capability-secure extension of MIPS, could be ported to
one to give it a security advantage to secure sales from defense sector.
Draper is aiming for that with SAFE architecture (crash-safe.org) added to
RISC-V. If wanting max reliability (eg safety-critical), VAMP was a 32-bit DLX
CPU formally-verified for correctness that could be done on older node with
mods for lock-step, triplicated redundancy, or board-level fault-tolerance.

So, there's possibilities to justify higher prices long enough to recover
upfront costs or get them down on simpler designs. The HiFive is a serious
core on a relatively-recent node, though. It's not going to be cheap unless
selling boatloads. They probably didn't expect this product to sell boatloads,
either.

~~~
Taniwha
don't forget the cost of testing - that adds up, often people do simple
testing on the wafer to avoid the cost of packaging bad die, then full testing
once packaged - remember a bad chip for a semi manufacturer is a whole bad
board for their customers

------
tux3
This is really cool, and I'd love to buy one, but it's an order of magnitude
too pricey for me to justify the purchase when I already have a (admittedly
probably slightly weaker) raspberry pi gathering dust.

~~~
throwaway2048
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
I'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.

~~~
qubex
I’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
I’m talking about U54 from SiFive specifically.

~~~
jabl
The U54 is a single-issue in-order core. Again, what makes you label that a
"workstation-class core"?

~~~
garmaine
The company's stated plans for the product line.

~~~
jabl
Hmm, my google-fu seems to be failing me, do you have a link where the company
states that?

~~~
garmaine
No, 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.

------
JoachimSchipper
Having an actual RISC-V ASIC is cool, but note that you can run a RISC-V
softcore on a significantly cheaper FPGA board - or even in software
simulation.

This is more interesting for showing progress in the RISC-V ecosystem than for
hacking around with.

~~~
aseipp
Honestly, if you want a full MMU with a Linux-capable RISC-V implementation
and everything, and a few cores like this -- you'll need a fairly decent FPGA,
as well as the clocking resources/peripherals so things aren't unusably slow.
You can get cheap FPGAs for the microcontroller-class devices/cores, but the
FPGAs SiFive recommend for U-series cores of theirs are quite expensive, like
$4000. lowRISC can run on something like a $1500 Kintex-7 devkit, I think.
There are better boards coming out soon at better price points (such as this
one[1]) that might fit the bill, but then you have to do board setup
yourself... It's not worth it IMO unless you plan on reusing the FPGA.

If you want a microcontroller class chip so you can just play with the 32-bit
instruction set -- you can get that with QEMU and a $60 HiFive1 board. You can
run picorv32 on a $50 FPGA, even! But if you want a Linux-class chip _now_
(with full features you expect e.g. from an ARM-class device) -- this is about
as good as it gets, I think. You won't get a 1.5ghz quad core performance like
that cheaply. For now. Next year it'll be different, hopefully.

I imagine the real reason this board is pricey is due to limited volume runs
for the ASIC on 28nm, which is the bulk (how many people will really buy one?
these are early adoption systems), and, I speculate, some of the weird
material choices. 8GB DDR4 ECC, ok sure that's cool and unique, but no SATA
port? Really, so I'm stuck on a stupidly large microSD card? And they specify
FMC, but FMC cards are typically very expensive for high-throughput devices
(think HDMI, ADC/DACs, SFP/SFP+ breakouts). Maybe they'll just go all out and
have the FMC mount the system directly onto a broken-out PCIe carrier board,
or something? I dunno.

As for hacking... all that said, the rather large amount of RAM and relatively
fast cores do excite me -- it means you can actually use the parallelism
offered for things like actual compilation. And it's real privileged silicon,
so for system porters/distros/etc I think it's probably more reasonable of a
purchase. I'm eager to get NixOS running on a real silicon device like this,
so I've supported it (I had a lot of fun with my HiFive1). If they had just
included SATA, this would be almost a no-brainer for integrators/distro
porters. I just hope they'll follow up on a decent expansion option... In the
mean time until it ships, QEMU should be ironed out enough by now to start a
real port...

[1] [https://shop.trenz-
electronic.de/en/TEF1001-01-Kintex-7-PCIe...](https://shop.trenz-
electronic.de/en/TEF1001-01-Kintex-7-PCIe-FMC-Carrier-with-Xilinx-
Kintex-7-160T-4-lane-PCIe-GEN2?c=462)

~~~
jackckang
Your speculation is quite accurate...there will be FMC expansion cards
specifically built for the HiFive Unleashed that will break out most of those
peripherals you're talking about (PCIe, SATA, to name a few in particular).
Unfortunately we weren't quite ready to announce those details today but will
be making those updates ASAP.

The reason for the large RAMs and microSD card is specifically to help
software developers. That's who the board is for until we can drive the cost
down even further for even more folks.

-Jack Kang, SiFive

~~~
aseipp
Thanks for the confirmation! The microSD card's _speed_ is my main complaint,
relative to everything else. But I'm just complaining I guess -- because
otherwise I think the board looks very good, without any expansions. :)

It seems every board always has a catch somewhere, but if an FMC expansion can
work around this, that'd be excellent. I'm looking very forward to putting
this machine through its paces once I get my hands on it!

~~~
rwmj
Without the expansion board you'd likely use iSCSI or NFS root for the OS. The
SD card would only be used to boot.

------
faragon
From the PDF: "Each U54 core has a high-performance single-issue in-order
64-bit execution pipeline, with a peak sustained execution rate of one
instruction per clock cycle.". I.e. lower performance per clock vs an ARM
Cortex A53 (2-way in-order execution 64 bit CPU).

As prototype, the price is OK, in my opinion. In volume there is no reason for
not selling a tiny board with those specs for under 40 USD (e.g. 2GB RAM Pine
64 quad Cortex A53 boards with gigabit ethernet are below 30 USD, including 3D
and video acceleration).

~~~
Karrot_Kream
While I love the Pine64 concept, the crappy docs and closed graphics blobs
means that Linux tends to have all sorts of weirdness, let alone BSD. I can't
wait for a first-class open platform.

~~~
faragon
Sure. I would love to buy that RISC-V board. But 1000 USD is way too much.
Anyway, it is not a bad start, e.g. exotic ARM dev boards are very expensive,
too.

------
herogreen
There is a little more information on the crowdsupply page:
[https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-
unleashed](https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unleashed)

------
topspin
What are the 8 SMA ports for? I've looked at the sifive page and the
crowdsupply site as well; haven't been able to figure it out. Not obvious why
a RISC-V development board would have SMA ports.

~~~
nickysielicki
Labels are the following:

GEMGXLALTCLK

PROCMON

DDRCTRLALTCLK

DDRPHYALTCLK

DDR_ATB0

DDR_ATB1

DDR_PLL_TESTOUT_P

DDR_PLL_TESTOUT_N

These are just SoC debug headers. Eg: GEMGXL comes from Gigabit Ethernet MAC,
and GXL is a marketing term from Cadence.

~~~
topspin
Six appear to be test points for monitoring memory bus clocks.

------
ch_123
Excited about RISC-V hardware hitting the market, less excited that it's $999.
I mean, I get that it's not going to be as cheap as a Raspi, and I'd happily
pay $200-300 for something like this. However, at $999, I think I'll wait.

------
phkahler
Any peripherals on this thing? They mention Ethernet and some SPI flash. How
about USB or even a UART? I didn't expect a frame buffer, but what does it
actually have? I thought they were going to have PCI via an FPGA, but no sign
of that either.

~~~
hucker
They presented this at FOSDEM today, and ran the entire presentation (and a
demo afterwards) on the actual hardware. They used PCI via an FPGA to
interface with a standard ATI gfx card iirc. I don't know if the video is out
yet, but have a look!

~~~
digi_owl
No video yet that i can find, but it seem the slides are available.

[https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/](https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/riscv/)

------
ams6110
What does "Linux-capable" mean? Are there other RISC-V systems that are _not_
"Linux-capable"?

~~~
cowboysauce
Yes, the same company sells arduino compatible RISC-V microcontroller boards
that are not capable of running Linux.

~~~
mcguire
What does "arduino compatible" mean in that context?

~~~
jabl
AFAIU it means that the I/O pins are compatible with Arduino shields.

 _Disclaimer_ : I have neither a HiFive1 or an Arduino myself.

------
cmrdporcupine
So the price is high, but I'd actually consider getting one if only they'd
exposed PCI ports and put it in, say, a MicroATX form factor or the like.

Maybe someone will make a daughterboard to make that happen for a reasonable
price. Then I'd maybe have fun making a little machine to run it. I really
like the idea of RISC-V.

Anybody have any idea how many MIPS we're talking here?

~~~
justinclift
The FMC adapter item on the specs is an standardised interface adapter.
Looking at the instructions for some of the previous dev kits points to an FMC
PCIe module that seems like the right kind of thing:

[http://www.hitechglobal.com/FMCModules/FMC_PCIExpress.htm](http://www.hitechglobal.com/FMCModules/FMC_PCIExpress.htm)

Obviously you'd want to check a bit more carefully. I'mjust pointing out that
PCIe seems like it's a go-er with the hardware right now even. :)

------
microcolonel
I'll probably be grabbing one as soon as it makes fiscal sense again. Kinda
bummed for the price point, but they aren't a charity.

It'd also be nice if they had an exposed PCIe slot and/or exposed DIMM slots
at this price point, but GbE is good enough for rapid testing.

------
dvfjsdhgfv
They might as well put $10,000 instead $1,000 and it wouldn't change things
much - most people interested in the board won't buy it as the price is
prohibitive. They would have to go below $100 at the very least.

~~~
ams6110
Academic buyers won't have a big problem with that price. It's a drop in the
bucket in the scope of all but the smallest research budgets.

~~~
mhayenga
Eh, if they have a defined project maybe...

$100 = Would buy this on a whim on the off-chance it's usable. Also, would
consider buying 12x of them to outfit an undergrad lab.

$1000 = Have to have a clear project/vision in mind of how the board would be
used and how other methods (FPGA/emulation) couldn't suffice.

------
Narishma
Anybody knows why it is so expensive? Is it just the low quantities?

~~~
rwmj
I was talking to the SiFive team yesterday and it's down to the relatively
small run of wafers they made. The price will come down, likely very
dramatically, but not for a while.

This board is very much to get hardware into the hands of developers who are
porting software (such as me), it's not really something for end users at this
time.

~~~
andromeduck
What are you porting?

~~~
davidlt
We are working on Fedora RISC-V.

------
webaholic
It's a great step towards making these chips more generally available. I am
sure they will release a low cost dev board like the rpi pretty soon.

------
wklm
Could anyone suggest other boards like this with intel cpus equivalent in
terms of performance?

~~~
TickleSteve
With intel... any number of PC motherboards. With ARM... any number of quad-
core ~1.2GHz boards.

Either of the above can easily be had for a few percent of the cost of the
RISC-V board, will likely out-perform it and they're losing money on each one
of them.

------
urlwolf
Can anyone ellaborate on how this compares to say ARM, intel etc?

~~~
ttul
It’s an open source design.

~~~
dmytroi
It is not AFAIK, this chip contains E51 and U54 cores, E51 from what I seen
(when prices were public) costs $595000.

\--- Upd: some news articles still mention launch prices [0]

\- [0] [https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/chinese-start-up-
sells-...](https://www.eetasia.com/news/article/chinese-start-up-sells-try-
and-buy-si-ip-online)

~~~
nickpsecurity
To put that into perspective, reports I read put MIPS at $700-900k with ARM
starting at $1+ million. Buyers of those get their ecosystem of existing
tools, OS's, libraries, etc. RISC-V doesn't have much of an ecosystem yet.
However, if FOSS software covers application requirements, then a SOC using
the RISC-V chip saves a lot of money upfront. Even more down the line since
SiFive doesn't charge royalties.

(Edited to change part about royalties after reading article more closely.)

------
nmca
woop woop! RISC-V is excellent and I hope this is the first of many!

------
lerie82
Why so pricey?

------
andreiw
Virtualization?

UART?

~~~
mastax
Virtualization instructions aren't finished yet:
[https://riscv.org/specifications/privileged-
isa/](https://riscv.org/specifications/privileged-isa/)

------
senatorobama
What's a good way to get involved in RISC-V

------
fithisux
PUN MODE ON

HiFive is the cheapest non-vaporware upgrade path for Amiga enthusiasts (if
they bring their own AGA GFX)

PUN MODE OFF

------
ksec
Sorry could someone explain to me why this is $999? ( Apart from because they
can.)

~~~
garmaine
28nm custom CPUs. They've spent millions on setting up the production run.
They are probably losing money on this board alone, to be honest, at that
price point and expected sales.

------
ramshanker
My ideal SERVER motherboard for home use: Raspberry Pi style.

1\. Compute: A Quad core processor. A73 maybe? 2\. Storage: 1 Sata Port to
host 1 Hard disc. for Boot / Storage. 3\. Network: 1 Gigabit Ethernet port.
4\. Power: 1 Micro USB port. 5\. RAM: 1 GB or optional 2 GB. 3\. 1 USB for
everything else.

That's it. No Audio port, No HDMI port, No GPIO Port. No Camera port, No extra
USB ports. No MicroSD connector. Now considering Raspberry price of $35, I
guess board could be done for <$20.

Every few days, I try to find one.

~~~
Quequau
What do you think of the new stuff from HardKernel?

~~~
ramshanker
Awesome. Thanks. ODROID-HC2 is on top of my list now. Waiting for my local
retailer to catchup!

------
rbanffy
Perhaps a cheaper route to have an OS up and running on a reference design for
hardware that's too new is to implement it on top of MAME.

Even if it takes an 8-way Xeon Platinum to run it at a reasonable speed, I
think more people will be able to experiment with it.

And the emulation provides some neat debugging opportunities.

~~~
detaro
Various RISC-V emulators are available, e.g. you can run Linux on a simulated
risc-v processor in qemu.

~~~
rbanffy
True. I wonder how much of this board's hardware is emulated in there.

~~~
rwmj
Quite a lot, see item 3 below:

    
    
        $ qemu-system-riscv64 -machine \?
        Supported machines are:
        none                 empty machine
        sifive_e300          RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive E300 SDK
        sifive_u500          RISC-V Board compatible with SiFive U500 SDK
        spike_v1.10          RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.10)
        spike_v1.9           RISC-V Spike Board (Privileged ISA v1.9.1) (default)
        virt                 RISC-V VirtIO Board (Privileged spec v1.10)

