YouTube: The SiFive HiFive Premier P550 [video]
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> Note that the $599 starting price is for a model with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory
That's incredibly expensive, I'd definitely wait for the sipeed/milkv SiFive P550 boards.
Here is a geekbench comparison of the P550 @1.4GHz vs Cortex-A72 @1.5GHz from the Pi4 (total scores: 150 vs 253): https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/123?baseline=74...
A large part of the differences are clearly due to missing RVV in the P550.
I'm not sure, but this seems to be P550 @ 1.8GHz results (181): https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6049688
The 1.4GHz version is on paper barely faster than the 1.8/2GHz C910 cores that have been available for a while, it's only a slight upgrade if you can reach the 1.8GHz boost. On the other-hand, this is just from geekbench, and many people reported that the C910 was surprisingly slow in real world compilation task, while the SiFive U74 performed a lot better than in comparison than geekbench would suggest.
It seems like sort of good news that RISC-V is beginning to approach ARM performance. Also good to see more working silicon from SiFive and others.
For now though a killer app seems to be license-free soft cores and embedded.
* Does it work entirely with mainline Linux kernel, including drivers? Which version?
* Are all the onboard devices open firmware?
* Is it free of unwanted processors like Intel ME and AMD PSP?
* Is that a daughterboard? If so, is the daughterboard suitable as a module in production? If so, what is on the main board, other than connectors and passives?
* Is "full-size" PCIe 3.0 slot actually x16? (Hard to see the connector at 22s in the video.)
* How much RAM, and is it ECC? Upgradeable?
* The GPU is only suitable for, say, 1080p or 4K video playing, not for general-purpose or AI compute, correct?
It should run some games. For reference, the MT6855 runs Genshin Impact at... playable... framerates on low settings. It wasn't designed with ML in mind, but I guess if the model is small enough...
The GPU has a perfectly functional Linux driver, not sure why Eswin haven't released it yet. Proprietary, of course. Prospects for an open-source driver are slim to none.
And yeah, the GPU has firmware running on an internal CPU. Proprietary ISA, closed-source firmware, blobs will be provided by Eswin (nb: Chinese). This has security implications even if you trust Imagination and Eswin, since the firmware is in charge of memory protection and there's probably some vulnerabilities in there.
Seems like we should be much further than we are today.
This board is touting incredible things like HDMI and dual gigabit Ethernet… it almost feels like they don’t want to be taken seriously, and that makes me sad.
Go faster. If you’re trying to keep excitement up by timing things, stop it. It is not working.
Without RVA22 or Vector, most of these boards are bound to end up as build machines for Linux distributions.
https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550
It is based on the ESWIN EIC7700X SoC with its quad core 1.8GHz RISC-V core
https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/ZxLjE4F3NbkBXuzW_EIC770...
You also get Imagination AXM-8-256 'GPU' on chip. You get h264/h265 encode/decode and '3d support' in a yet-to-be-released driver.
Looks like a fairly promising product -- quite a step up from the unmatched
https://www.sifive.com/press/hifive-premier-p550-development...
From what I can tell, this is the early access version, not the Ubuntu version touted in the YouTube video. But, hopefully this will start to make RISC-V boards more widely available and mainstream. Especially as this dev board looks to include some necessary IO comforts.
Yikes... I'll wait
Remove YouTube;