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Comment by farseer | Hacker News Reader

Anyone buying their risc-v IP and socs, other than hobbyists? The company has been around for a few years now.

They've had some design wins. For instance, the new PolarFire SoC FPGA-plus-CPU systems from Microsemi (recently bought by Microchip) use two SiFive designs, a simple microcontroller-like core and a quad-core application processor: https://www.microsemi.com/document-portal/doc_download/12445....

There is also a dev kit for this [1], could use more RAM though.

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/microchip/polarfire-soc-icicle-k...

Yeah, I was looking at that. At $500 USD, that's a little outside of what I'd want to spend on something like that. I'm still thinking about it though.

I really wish they just used a (SO)DIMM slot but there we go.

Still tempted to get one, the dual NICs and FPGA fabric could make an interesting network gateway. I’d wonder what throughput you could get if you used the FPGA for routing and maybe even some inspection.

Western Digital is shipping SiFive RISCV controllers in their hand drives now. And I believe Samsung just announced that they’ve begun integrating with SiFive hardware in some way.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15228/samsung-to-use-riscv-co...

https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/04/03/sifive-partners-with...

I work for a defense contractor and we’ve been using these in R&D for a little over a year. They seem promising and SiFive has been working to fix every bug we find. I’m encouraged about the future of RISC-V in aerospace.

This is one of the more encouraging things I've heard about this space recently. Obviously no worries if not, but is there any more detail you can provide about the (I'm assuming) niches you're using it in?

Are you looking to use seL4 or Chisel with your RISC-V projects?

We’ve been using chisel, but SiFive’s creation tools mean you don’t have to write anything. Before we went the SiFive route, we were generating CPUs with rocket and getting frustrated when there was no documentation.

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