Comment by snazz
7 years ago
I had heard of the SiFive/HiFive Unleashed, but not of the expansion board. I’m surprised that it “just worked” and I really like the case!
7 years ago
I had heard of the SiFive/HiFive Unleashed, but not of the expansion board. I’m surprised that it “just worked” and I really like the case!
The article didn't mention that the development board costs 1000 USD and the expansion board costs another 2000 USD, and it's only a barebone system, a full system comparable to a high-performance PC would require another 500 USD. At this price level (~3000+USD), one can almost purchase an OpenPOWER-based workstation (as we already have seen, the crowdfund campaign for Talos Secure Workstation failed due to its price, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-wo...). So no, I still don't think RISC-V is as usable as a PC for an average user at its current shape as a prototype for developers.
you can get a nice, complete POWER9 desktop tower for $2,364.99
https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/TLSDS3/intro.html
Probably more open, too.
You can download a lot of the RISC-V's source to use in FPGA's or your own hardware. Nobody has given me a link to the same for POWER9. There's also a lower risk of getting patent sued for selling RISC-V versus IBM's I.P.. I'd say POWER9 is nowhere near as open as the RISC-V offering. It's "open" like OpenVMS: using the word to get dollars more than maximizing openness.
1 reply →
It "just worked" thanks to huge amounts of work by folk from WDC, SiFive, Microsemi, Fedora, and Debian.