SiFive Unveils "the World's Fastest" RISC-V Development Board, and the Heart of Its RISC-V PC
HiFive Unmatched aims for ITX compatibility and high performance with four application processors, one real-time processor, and 8GB of RAM.
UPDATE(11/6/2020): SiFive has now officially opened orders for the HiFive Unmatched, an ITX format single-board computer powered by the company's most powerful RISC-V processor yet and targeting developers looking for a personal computer-like platform on which to develop for and port to the free and open source RISC-V architecture.
As promised, the HiFive Unmatched is available on Crowd Supply for $665, which includes the board with Freedom U740 processor, offering four application-class U74 RISC-V cores and a fifth real-time S7 RISC-V core, and 8GB DDR4 memory. The first shipments are expected to take place in mid-January 2021, with more information available on the project's Crowd Supply campaign page.
Original article continues below.
RISC-V pioneer SiFive has revealed more details about its upcoming RISC-V personal computer, which will be based around the freshly-unveiled HiFive Unmatched development board powered by its FU740 five-core system-on-chip (SoC) hardware.
SiFive unveiled its plan to offer an affordable personal computer built around a 64-bit implementation of the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) last month, as a means of encouraging software developers to begin porting their software to the platform. Now, the company has unveiled the board at the heart of the effort: the HiFive Unmatched.
"The HiFive Unmatched enables developers to create the RISC-V-based software they need for RISC-V platforms," explains SiFive senior director James Prior. "From real-time operating systems to custom Linux distributions, and the compilers, libraries, and applications that go with product design, developers can use the HiFive Unmatched to natively test and build RISC-V code."
"The SiFive HiFive Unmatched comes in the mini-ITX standard form factor to make it easy to build a RISC-V PC. For the first time, standard industry connectors such as ATX power supplies, PCI-Express(r) expansion, Gigabit Ethernet, and USB ports are present on a single-board RISC-V development system."
The board is built around SiFive's latest FU740 SoC, which packs four high-performance SiFive U74 application processor cores and an S7 core for real-time processing. The board includes 8GB of DDR4 memory, 32MB of quad-SPI flash, and a microSD card slot — though most users will likely prefer to use the PCIe Gen. 3 4x M.2 slot for high-performance NVMe storage. Additional expansion is available from a PCIe Gen. 3 1x M.2 slot, designed for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth modules, and a full-size PCIe Gen. 3 8x slot for graphics cards, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), accelerators, or other accessories.
The rear of the board includes a gigabit Ethernet port and four USB 3.2 Gen.1 Type-A ports for peripherals, which sit alongside micro-USB ports for serial console debugging and the microSD slot. The board is designed to install in any ITX-compatible PC housing, though SiFive does not appear to be planning to offer its own.
Pre-orders, which will include a microSD pre-loaded with a Linux distribution and "popular system developer packages," are to open soon at $665; interested parties can register to be alerted when pre-orders go live on the SiFive website.