Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
computerworld.com.au
Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
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Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#2I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#3I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
The HiFive1 from sifive for $60 is what I got.
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#4I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
You can buy one from SiFive: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive1 although it's going to be a while until a RISC-V chip will be packaged on a board with USB, Ethernet, SATA, and all peripherals that make an ATX motherboard or a Raspberry Pi worth owning.
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#5I wonder how of those fit in a zedboard. (not going to ask how many hours of tool fighting that would require though).
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#6I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
SiFive
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#7[deleted]
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#8I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
You can buy the HiFive1 board (I have a few and they're swell), but it's more of a microcontroller than an application processor, the board is Arduino compatible. If you want something more like a Raspberry Pi or bigger, you'll have to wait a bit longer.
The Freedom Unleashed platform is coming down the pipe, and you can pre-evaluate it on an FPGA board (albeit at lower frequency, and fairly pricy since it's a complex design and requires a fairly large FPGA to prototype). I won't pretend to know when they'll have a standard Freedom U500 SoC dev board, but it will have multiple cores, PCIe 3.0, USB 3, Gigabit ethernet, and DDR4 compatibility according to their website[1].
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#9I want to buy RISC-V, both to play with and to support the cause. What are my options like and should I buy something now or wait for the next generation?
Apart from buying an actual dev kit like HiFive from SiFive, a great way to get into it is to buy SiFive's FPGA kits
https://dev.sifive.com/freedom-soc/evaluate/fpga/
The FPGA board can be used for other things too. If you are really adventurous, I'd suggest buying a FPGA board with better chip so you can fit in larger IP blocks in the future. It will work perfectly fine as a replacement for the above FPGA kit I've linked to.
My suggestion would be this[1]. It has a pretty large LUT count so you can go nuts. The RAM and Ethernet will be pretty useful if you want to run linux[2] and test out stuff. It'll be a bit hard to run linux on it right now.
On the other hand, you can choose a Parallela board[3] which comes with a FPGA chip along with a new (soon to be retired) arch called epiphany. Here[4] is a GSoC project which runs linux on that board using the FPGA.
[1]: http://store.digilentinc.com/nexys-4-ddr-artix-7-fpga-traine... [2]: https://github.com/riscv/riscv-linux [3]: https://www.parallella.org/ [4]: https://github.com/eliaskousk/parallella-riscv
Re: Open-source chip RISC-V to take on closed x86, ARM CPUs
#10I look forward to a RISC-V proc powering my laptop with some ridiculous Nvidia GPU. We must escape x86 :(