StarFive catalog parts use slightly tweaked SiFive cores. So if you were going to license a SiFive core for an embedded design, you may want to have something that uses the catalog part to verify your code will work.
I mean, emulating your core for development is a good approach in general, but at some point you may want to run your code on actual silicon.
So sure, an Intel i9 or ARM Mac is probably going to be faster than a 4 core U74 SoC, but if you're using a RISC-V core for some embedded application, having a RISC-V system to test with is probably a good idea.
And it's cool you can get a RISC-V SBC for a couple hundred bux. It wasn't too long ago that you paid $2k for a 4 core U54 SoC with minimal peripherals. And if you can stuff it in a laptop form factor, it's portable.
You can get a quad core U74 1.5 GHz RISC-V SBC for $40 -- the Milk-V Mars. Or $34 for the Compute Module version. Or $5 for the Milk-V Duo with 1.0 GHz single core and 64 MB RAM, which is more appropriate for many embedded uses and still runs Linux (with a 2nd 700 MHz 64 bit RISC-V microcontroller core for real-time tasks)
> It wasn't too long ago that you paid $2k for a 4 core U54 SoC with minimal peripherals
The HiFive Unleashed was never $2k. The standard price was $999, and the first batch of preorders (which I got one of) was $1199.
It indeed was lacking in peripherals, with only 8 GB RAM, an SD card, and gigE interfaces natively, but an FPGA Mezzanine connector that allowed turning it into a full PC using a standard Xilinx FPGA dev board, or the much cheaper custom MicroSemi expansion board.
But if you didn't mind booting from SD, SSHing/X in, and mounting storage from your PC using NFS (etc) then you could do a lot of software development with the bare $999 board.
I mean, emulating your core for development is a good approach in general, but at some point you may want to run your code on actual silicon.
So sure, an Intel i9 or ARM Mac is probably going to be faster than a 4 core U74 SoC, but if you're using a RISC-V core for some embedded application, having a RISC-V system to test with is probably a good idea.
And it's cool you can get a RISC-V SBC for a couple hundred bux. It wasn't too long ago that you paid $2k for a 4 core U54 SoC with minimal peripherals. And if you can stuff it in a laptop form factor, it's portable.