The Mini-ITX mainboard HiFive Unmatched is equipped with the RISC-V processor SiFive Freedom U 740, the four Linux contains suitable RV 64 GC cores. The FU 740 connects 8 GB of RAM and another controller that provides PCI Express 3.0.

The HiFive Unmatched has a PCIe 3.0 x8 slot – e.g. for a graphics card – as well as two M.2 sockets, one with PCIe 3.0 x4 for an SSD and one with PCIe 3.0 x1 for WLAN / Bluetooth. There is also Gigabit Ethernet as well as USB 3.2 Gen 1 and a MicroUSB socket for debugging.

Registered developers should use the SiFive HiFive Unmatched “soon” for 665 can pre-order US dollars; SiFive Marketing Director James Prior has not yet mentioned the delivery date in the blog.

Platform for more RISC-V software That SiFive HiFive Unmatched is intended to promote the spread of RISC-V technology by providing more programmers with an affordable Linux platform. The board comes with a MicroSD card with pre-installed “Linux”, which Prior does not specify.

The four RV 64 GC cores in SiFive Freedom Unleashed 740 (FU 740) come from the 2018 presented SiFive family U 74, whose performance SiFive roughly matches that of the 2017 presented ARM Cortex-A 55 (Ananke) compares. The latter is a particularly efficient computing core that is also found in current smartphone SoCs such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 690.

Predecessor HiFive Unleashed SiFive had 2018 the developer board HiFive Unleashed with Freedom U 540 released. Thanks to RV 64 GC cores, this chip is also Linux-compatible, but the HiFive Unleashed cost just under 1000 US dollars and requires a significantly more expensive additional FPGA board to connect PCIe devices. The latter is also no longer available at Crowdsupply.

The Arduino-compatible HiFive1 is still available for just under 60 U.S. dollar; the RV 32 – cores of the SiFive FE sitting on it 310 are intended for real-time operating systems. The chip was also used on the Arduino Cinque. Developer boards with the Chinese RISC-V microcontroller GigaDevice GD 32 V are available for a few euros.

The RIOS project is currently working on the PicoRio with RV 64 GC chip , which is based on the Raspberry Pi. (ciw)