SiFive HiFive Unmatched RISC-V Developer Boards Begin Shipping

Announced last year was the HiFive Unmatched as the most compelling RISC-V development board to date. Following supply chain issues and everything else brought on by the pandemic, this very interesting RISC-V developer board is now shipping to customers.

The HiFive Unmatched is a mini-ITX board built around the SiFive FU740 SoC with four U74-MC cores and one S7 core while having 16GB of DDR4 RAM. The board has a PCI Express x16 slot (albeit at PCIe Gen3 x8 speeds), NVMe M.2 slot, micro-SD slot, Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and other modern connectivity. It has a decent amount of power to it, can be conveniently mounted inside a mini-ITX case, and feature set makes it quite a nice developer board for those wanting to dive into the RISC-V ecosystem.

Originally the HiFive Unmatched was supposed to ship in Q4 of last year. But then in December it was upgraded to 16GB of RAM and postponed to mid-Q1. Now in mid-Q2, I received word from SiFive this morning that the boards are finally shipping. This latest quarter slip is attributed to the COVID-19 supply chain disruptions plaguing the industry.

I am told that the first boards are now shipping and they expect to have all initial orders covered by mid-June. SiFive has also completed all necessary testing and FCC/CE paperwork.

Besides covering the initial pre-orders for the HiFive Unmatched, they expect to have enough "spares" ready following that mid-June equilibrium for covering the upcoming orders in a timely manner.

Pricing on the HiFive Unmatched RISC-V developer board is ~$665 USD from Mouser and Crowd Supply. For those looking at a cheaper way to get involved with some RISC-V dabbling, SiFive also has a kids coding kit that is powered by a RISC-V processor albeit much less capable and catering just towards some basic programming exercises.

We should have our hands on the HiFive Unmatched in the coming weeks for RISC-V Linux benchmarking and looking at the RISC-V Linux distribution support.