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Comment by brucehoult | Hacker News Reader

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched

PCIe, 16 GB DDR4, two M.2 (one for storage, one WIFI), quad core 1.5 GHz (same cores as this board, but twice as many)

Sensible spec. The price isn’t outlandish for what is basically a desktop with a relatively exotic CPU. 16GB ram is minimum for development in my view even though you can do a lot in 8GB.

I'm sure people would start comparing it pricewise to a i7 or something made at significant economies of scale. I think that is an unfair comparison due to the exotic CPU. Exotic in the sense that these aren't commodity CPUs.

That's a little costly, but I guess development of a board like that isn't cheap.

Existing is the first step. Prices will reduce in time -- probably quite rapidly.

The board has 16GB DDR4 memory on board, that's probably one of the most costly components.

16GB DDR4 2400 DIMMs run about $67 retail. So about 1/10 of the total cost of that board. It's a little apples and oranges, but since it seems like they just plucked down the same 8 chips you'd find on a DIMM right to the board maybe not that much.

I note that it has a PCIe x8 slot, but they don't have drivers for a video card (or any card) yet so it's kinda useless.

People have been running Radeon graphics cards with Linux desktop and the open source driver on the predecessor HiFive Unleashed board for literally three years already.

SiFive demonstrates the HiFive Unmatched using a $300 150W Radeon RX580. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVsnnYuvDXI

You can complain that you don't want to spend that much on a graphics card [1] but you can't complain that it's not supported.

[1] cheaper ones will work too

Then they should probably mention that on their page, which only says that graphics cards are being planned for but not currently supported.

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