News SiFive, Intel Announce HiFive Pro P550 MicroATX RISC-V Development Board

[Admin]

The HiFive Pro P550 development board uses a "Horse Creek" SoC built using the Intel 4 process.

SiFive, Intel Announce HiFive Pro P550 MicroATX RISC-V Development Board : Read more

 

[JamesJones44]

I'm a little surprised by the board type, I would have expected something more like a Raspberry PI than PC motherboard given the low power application target. I guess though if you hope to make it into future laptops this might be a more useful dev board.

 

[ezst036]

I would like to see a day come when you could drop a RISC-V processor into an existing motherboard with a BIOS update, like it was in the Socket 7 days.

An AM4/AM5 or LGA1200/LGA1700 RISC processor. Drop, flash, and go.

 

[bit_user]

I'm a little surprised by the board type, I would have expected something more like a Raspberry PI than PC motherboard given the low power application target. I guess though if you hope to make it into future laptops this might be a more useful dev board.

The whole point was to make a platform that wouldn't constraint software developers. This is a development vehicle - not an end-user product. It probably won't be cheap, either.

That being said, I'm pretty impressed by the specs. The weakest thing on that board is definitely the CPU, itself. Still, it's miles better than any RISC-V development board we've had to date. I'm guessing performance will probably be somewhere around that of a Sandbridge i5 desktop.

 

[bit_user]

BTW, this looks to be where you can order one: https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-pro-p550

They also promise docs, but none are currently available. I'm curious to know what integrated graphics it's using, not that it really matters all that much.

 

[bit_user]

I would like to see a day come when you could drop a RISC-V processor into an existing motherboard with a BIOS update, like it was in the Socket 7 days.

An AM4/AM5 or LGA1200/LGA1700 RISC processor. Drop, flash, and go.

It's a nice idea. AMD did something like that, with the Opteron A1100, which was an 8-core A57 server CPU.

https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/hierofalcon-product-brief.pdf

I think that's as far as it'll go - within a vendor, you might get socket-compatibility if/when they adopt ARM or RISC-V.