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Comment by mrlonglong | Hacker News Reader

At £500+ it's not a realistic prospect I'm afraid. Maybe if there more affordable ones that becomes available then I definitely would want to take a look in-depth.

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AFAIK, SiFives business is about selling their RISC-V cores and ASIC consulting services. RISC-V is still kind of new as far as hard silicon Linux-capable cores go. My understanding is that this thing is meant to serve as a dev kit for their U74 core and U740 SoC platform, provide hardware for interested-enough Linux kernel devs and distro maintainers, and serve as a real, up-for-sale RISC-V board with a real SoC, 'all the fixins', and no FPGA. That's to say it's not a board for people who'd otherwise buy a RasPI or slightly more expensive SBC -- It's closer to a proof of concept.

We’ve been through this here on HN. The board is designed around a chip that really wants to be a router. This is a bit expensive for a desktop workstation and will cater to people really determined to make this the year of the RISC-V desktop rather than the average developer, such as myself, who, while considering x86s disgusting, still buys them because they are cost-effective.

Why do you feel this is optimized as a router, are you mixing it up with the SolidRun HoneyComb ARM system ?

Oops... I think I did. Sorry.

Why is X86 disgusting?

Ugly ugly ugly ISA. We throw away a little bit of performance and a lot of power because of how weird and old it is.

It's a matter of taste, but x86 has a lot of historical cruft because it's been around long enough to see 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit industry transitions. Off the top of my head, x86 memory segmentation and fragmentation between BIOS vs. UEFI and ACPI vs. the absence of device trees (AFAIK).

But it is kinda cool to run software that originally was built for the 8088 on an AMD Threadripper. But yes, I do agree the x86 architecture is fast losing its lustre.

Check out the Nezha D1 RISC-V SBC:

https://hackerboards.com/boards/nezha/

Not sure how easy they are to get ... but $99 is a great price.

One seller on AliExpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=sipeed+nezha

These are very slow with limited RAM. It's possible to run Linux but it won't be much fun.

Is 1GiB considered 'little RAM' these days for an embedded board?

Perhaps not for embedded, but it's being compared to a development board with 16 GB.

I actually thought the board above had only 512 MB, hence my comment, but even 1 GB is quite limiting. The HiFive Unleashed (previous SiFive board) has 8 GB and that is quite tight for some of the larger builds we do, or for doing parallel builds.

The bigger problem with the board above is the single core.

Why not cross-compile?

Distributions tend not to like cross-compiling, because it's not as flexible (how do you run test-programs?) and sometimes has bugs you don't have when native compiling.

I have an ARM board with 4 A53 cores with just 1GB of RAM. Despite these limitations I can successfully cross compile from my host. So yes, under circumstances memory might not be such a big issue.

That doesn't seem like an unreasonable price to me. Do you know of a cheaper alternative with the same performance?

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