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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

There are tons of other people who are working on RISC-V as well, LowRISC for example. The software should run everywhere.

I’m talking about the Freedom Unleashes platform from SiFive.

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.

I’m talking about U54 from SiFive specifically.

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

The company's stated plans for the product line.

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

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.

Well... this certainly isn’t workstation-class performance. This is more like a smartphone SoC.

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.

> 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 ..

> 'well, time to upgrade it'

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.

It's a dev board. It's not intended for end users, it's intended for people prototyping new systems based around the SiFive.

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.

Same here. Kinda bummed, I was looking forward to it :(

Looking at their crowdsupply page, they did make a smaller arduino-like board [0] at a very reasonnable $59 price point.

I'm not sure if those are still available, but you might want to check it out!

[0]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1

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.

Never mind that said RPi have multiple USB and video ports to go along with ethernet (and on later models, wifi).

Also availability, availability, availability. The RPi can be bought from a multitude of places across the globe.

All that said, if we could get a version with a bit more onboard IO options, and preferably something like SATA, i would be all over it.

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