Hacker News Reader

Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

I had heard of the SiFive/HiFive Unleashed, but not of the expansion board. I’m surprised that it “just worked” and I really like the case!

View on HN

The article didn't mention that the development board costs 1000 USD and the expansion board costs another 2000 USD, and it's only a barebone system, a full system comparable to a high-performance PC would require another 500 USD. At this price level (~3000+USD), one can almost purchase an OpenPOWER-based workstation (as we already have seen, the crowdfund campaign for Talos Secure Workstation failed due to its price, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-wo...). So no, I still don't think RISC-V is as usable as a PC for an average user at its current shape as a prototype for developers.

you can get a nice, complete POWER9 desktop tower for $2,364.99

https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS3/intro.html

Probably more open, too.

You can download a lot of the RISC-V's source to use in FPGA's or your own hardware. Nobody has given me a link to the same for POWER9. There's also a lower risk of getting patent sued for selling RISC-V versus IBM's I.P.. I'd say POWER9 is nowhere near as open as the RISC-V offering. It's "open" like OpenVMS: using the word to get dollars more than maximizing openness.

I meant open regarding the hardware, bootloader, etc., but it seems like sifive has released more code since I last looked and you can now bring up a board without any blobs.

And yeah, we won't be seeing openpower on FPGAs anytime soon.

It "just worked" thanks to huge amounts of work by folk from WDC, SiFive, Microsemi, Fedora, and Debian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com