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Comment by ch_123 | Hacker News Reader

I hope they release an update of the "Unmatched" motherboard with one of these chips. I'm reluctant to spend ~$700 on a platform which uses in-order cores which are presumably designed for low-power devices.

(Yes, I appreciate I may not be the intended audience for that board, but I would still like to build a RISC-V based desktop one of these years)

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The P550 core in the title is actually a 3 way issue OOO core with near A76 performance, but fair point on the dev boards. Hopefully Intel's dev board or some alternative will provide a lower cost option.

You wouldn't be happy with the Unmatched. At 1.2 GHz, it's slower than a Rpi4. Even a Beagleboard-X15 (2 core armv7) is faster.

Well, naturally. The Pi 4's A72 cores are much more sophisticated than the cores in the Unmatched. Comparing it against A53 or A55 boards (Pi 3, Odroid C2 or C4) is more appropriate.

You don't buy a HiFive Unmatched because it's faster or cheaper than an ARM-based board. It's obviously not.

You buy a HiFive Unmatched because you specifically want to run or create RISC-V software because you believe that will be important in the future and the Unmatched is currently the highest performance way to do that, certainly for single-threaded code or for running a full desktop OS with accelerated GUI.

You get get more overall multi-threaded RISC-V performance running QEMU on an x86 machine with 8+ cores. That's probably going to cost more. But you might already have one that's not heavily used.

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