SiFive Announces HiFive Unmatched RISC-V PC for $665

sifive.com

9 pointsrwmj2 comments

Well, they've finally got the right form factor, but that price is...expensive, esp. considering it's not got much more than a Raspberry PI 4 Compute Module + I/O board which is about £110/$150. And the PI has a GPU built-in.

Likely that PCIe switch IC they've got in there is a fair chunk of that price.

You have to understand why the Raspberry Pi is priced the way it is: it's because it is a side effect of the massive production of Broadcom chips for tablets, phones, embedded, etc. Millions and millions are made. A relatively tiny number of these find their way into developer boards. The economies of scale mean they can be very cheap.

RISC-V doesn't have this ... yet ... but there are several Chinese manufacturers currently making millions of chips for consumer devices with those going through foundries right now. So sooner or later the economics will work out for a "RISC-V Pi". I'd be surprised if it doesn't exist by 2022.

For now this SiFive board is IMHO the best PC-like developer experience for RISC-V. [Disclaimer: Red Hat works with SiFive]

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