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.
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.
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.
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.
The U54 is squarely in the Pi competitor category. Claimed IPC is slightly lower at 1.7DMIPS/Mhz vs 2.3 for the Cortex-A53 in the Pi and this SoC clocks slightly higher than the Pi at 1.5Ghz vs 1.2Ghz, so performance should be quite similar. I certainly hope it manages to catch on and we get higher performance RISC-V chips at a reasonable cost in the future but these are clearly not it. If by "workstation class" you mean Skylake/Zen levels of performance there's a long way to go.
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.
> I'm not sure there will be cheaper boards, to be honest.
a) No need to assert honesty - we assume everyone is trying to be honest with each other here.
b) History is littered with people believing or claiming that some thing can not possibly become smaller / cheaper / faster ... it's a dangerous predictive path to wander, with basically no recorded precedents to cite.
While my Pi isn't gathering dust, I too don't have the budget for a 1k dev board... I get that they probably have a lot of cost to cover, but at this point only investors can really buy this hardware (i.e. a company needing open CPU hardware for research or future products might invest in a 1k board)
I'm gonna buy one, because I'm quite used to spending $1k on computers .. been doing it for decades .. and this machine is the kind of machine I'd rather be spending my next $1k on, than say, the current commercial crop.
So I hope this won't be the first rev, and that I look back in 2 years or so and go 'well, time to upgrade it' .. this would be an economic as well as practically good investment. You know, like any computer you might purchase ..
Won't happen. It's a dev board, not a computer like you'd purchase. If you come in expecting a computer instead of a sort-of-not-broken work in progress, you're setting yourself up for regret.
The RISC-V community is trying to make real useful practical computer. The next revision of this board would be something that is of practical use. There is lots of practical things you can do with it alrady, it has a networking. Maybe not the cheapes option but still useful.
Totally agree. One of the main advancements in the last several years IMO has been bringing the cost of this type of thing (ie; dev boards for microcontrollers, RPi, Arduino, etc) way, way down. I remember back in the day to get the equipment needed to program your own MCN or FPGA required a substantial investment, nowhere near approachable for a typical hobbyist or generally interested person. Now days you can order 3.3 and 5v arduino pro mini's by the caseload for $1.50 apiece.
Pretty different board. RISC-V ISA has various well-defined subsets. The cheap board is the microcontroller end of the spectrum. This CPU has an MMU, etc.
