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As RISC-V has been making its way, we’ve been looking to find the best examples of RISC-V to see whether it can compete with ARM and Intel in the real world. With the failure of the P550 Pro which wasn’t available, the P550 is now coming
The HiFive Premier P550 is the latest board from HiFive and is slated to be the first out-of-order RISC-V development board.
There’s been some surprise since the board has a chip with Eswin markings. Eswin is a Chinese SoC manufacturer. Surprising since SiFive partnered with Intel. Given Intel’s problems, there’s a lot of reasons
why they may have gone with someone else. While cost may sometimes figure, it seems that Intel couldn’t provide a supply of devices, since the P550 Pro based CPUs that were being built by Intel were never available.
It’s very likely that SiFive realized that if they kept with Intel, that they wouldn’t get any silicon, hence choosing a willing and able partner with Eswin.
Image Courtesy of SiFive
Hardware
Eswin EIC7700 SoC that’s used by the P550 features:
- Quad SiFive P550 Cores capable of 1.4GHz clock speeds (up to 1.8GHz) with a triple-issue, out-of-order 13-stage pipeline
- 128GB eMMC SSD
- x16 PCIe 3.0
- 5x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Ports
The P550 has been reported with the following
- 16GB or 32GB DDR5 Memory
- 127GB eMMC SSD
- PCIe 3.0 x 4
- 5x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Ports
- SATA3 @ 6Gb/s
- Dual Gigabit Ethernet
- Remote Debug Ethernet Port
There were no details on the integrated GPU. One thing we noted is that the P550 has no vector support, and the performance for things that can take advantage of parallel processing will be much lower.
The board is 170mm wide by 170mm long, a big large but not surprising for a board that intends to be a computer replacement.
The board should be available through Arrow Electronics in July 2024
Images Courtesy of SiFive
