The State of RISC-V Hardware & Software In Early 2018

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The State of RISC-V Hardware & Software In Early 2018

Palmer Dabbelt who maintains the RISC-V ports of GCC, Binutils, Linux, and glibc while working at RISC-V company SiFive spoke at FOSDEM 2018 this weekend about the software/hardware state of this royalty-free open-source CPU ISA...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RISC-V-Early-2018

[Brophen]

I saw it had ECC and got excited. Then saw the price tag and got unexcited. MacchiatoBin is still my best bet so far!

[uid313]

I would like to see something like Raspberry Pi 3 but with RISC-V instead.
Or even better, something like Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos or HiSilicon Kirin.
8 cores, 64-bit, LPDDR4, SD/MMC, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, IR, UFS, USB Type-C.

[LaeMing]

Little disappointed the baseboard doesn't include the FPGA (providing - unaccelerated - HDMI and USB2.1) as shown in previous slides on the reference platform, especially at that price-point (a bit ouchy, but not unreasonable for what this represents). Hopefully a daughterboard with this functionality will be ready by hardware release time.

[johanb]

I would like to see something like Raspberry Pi 3 but with RISC-V instead.

After the devboard is released and we start getting proper upstream linux support that is fully working and they start mass production of some RISC-V chip we will start seeing this.
If we are lucky that should be before the next year.

Or even better, something like Qualcomm Snapdragon, Samsung Exynos or HiSilicon Kirin.
8 cores, 64-bit, LPDDR4, SD/MMC, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, IR, UFS, USB Type-C.

Those are some incredibly ambitions requirements. None of which seem unreasonable, but all of them on a single chip seems very unlikely.

If we are talking 8 cores with lower clocks that doesn't seem too far away, 64-bit RISC-V chips are now available, LPDDR4 should not be hard to get support for and the rest seem more like getting PCIe/USB working properly and including it on the SBC.

[jabl]

Little disappointed the baseboard doesn't include the FPGA (providing - unaccelerated - HDMI and USB2.1) as shown in previous slides on the reference platform, especially at that price-point (a bit ouchy, but not unreasonable for what this represents). Hopefully a daughterboard with this functionality will be ready by hardware release time.

The baseboard has a FMC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FPGA_Mezzanine_Card ) connector though. They did the FOSDEM presentation using the actual HW, and a FMC FPGA daughter card connecting to other peripherals (notably a GPU to drive the graphics output).

But yeah, the price is disappointing, but understandable. This was a comparatively low volume run to get the HW into the hands of software porters and people developing actual products based on the chip, not an RPi competitor for end users and hobbyists. Hopefully that will come in due time.

[Cape]

unfortunately well out of our reach for any linux testing or benchmark comparisons unless we happen to receive a review sample.

wink furging wink