RISC will change everything.
Basically, it enables you to do hard real-time tasks like signal generation (controlling led matrices, audio) or fast data/signal acquisition, but without running some specialty os. The minion cores can read+write memory from the main cpu that's running normal Linux.
That feature also gives them a little breathing room on initial pricing. Their SoC board would be viewed as competition for a $70 board, instead of competition for a cheaper Raspberry PI or similar. So, initial pricing wouldn't necessarily hurt the popularity.
They seem to plan to have something out either this year, or sometime next year: "We are expecting to crowdfund an initial instantiation of the lowRISC platform during the course of 2017."
[1]http://www.lowrisc.org/downloads/lowRISC-memo-2014-001.pdf
There are other companies on the verge of releasing hardware implementations. But in every case, I would wait for the final specs before jumping on any particular hardware even if it shipped now. Other than the micro controllers of course.
> Burn: RISC architecture is going to change everything. > Cool: Yeah, RISC is good...
Linux will run in 8 megabytes of RAM if you want. The SiFive board has 16 kilobytes.
I saw Flash as the larger limitation, as expanding that is problematic.
There aren't enough pins. Certainly not enough pins accesible in single-cycle reads/writes. Maybe you could multiplex them with external hardware to talk to a SIMM but you'd be talking to memory at single megahertz effectively.
An SDRAM controller in an FPGA on the other side of the QSPI link would be faster, but it'd still be slow. You could get it to work to say you've done it, but it'd run at literal-days-to-boot speeds.
The board (and chip) is meant and marketed for freetards who like Arduinos - so I bought one and so did several of my friends. LEDs were blinked and better futures dreamt of. It's cool. But it's not a workstation chip by any stretch of the imagination.
Hopefully the next version will have a real external memory bus.
[1] http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20...
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/190350/mmu-less-ker...