Hacker Remix

YouTube: The SiFive HiFive Premier P550 [video]

28 points by fork-bomber 2 days ago | 9 comments

camel-cdr 2 days ago

https://liliputing.com/sifive-hifive-premiere-p550-risc-v-bo...

> Note that the $599 starting price is for a model with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory

That's incredibly expensive, I'd definitely wait for the sipeed/milkv SiFive P550 boards.

Here is a geekbench comparison of the P550 @1.4GHz vs Cortex-A72 @1.5GHz from the Pi4 (total scores: 150 vs 253): https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/123?baseline=74...

A large part of the differences are clearly due to missing RVV in the P550.

I'm not sure, but this seems to be P550 @ 1.8GHz results (181): https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/6049688

The 1.4GHz version is on paper barely faster than the 1.8/2GHz C910 cores that have been available for a while, it's only a slight upgrade if you can reach the 1.8GHz boost. On the other-hand, this is just from geekbench, and many people reported that the C910 was surprisingly slow in real world compilation task, while the SiFive U74 performed a lot better than in comparison than geekbench would suggest.

musicale 2 days ago

> P550 @1.4GHz vs Cortex-A72 @1.5GHz from the Pi4 (total scores: 150 vs 253)

It seems like sort of good news that RISC-V is beginning to approach ARM performance. Also good to see more working silicon from SiFive and others.

For now though a killer app seems to be license-free soft cores and embedded.

neilv 2 days ago

Dramatic. :) For the potential fandom side of a dev board (other than companies being a fan of not paying for ARM licensing), a software person's questions:

* Does it work entirely with mainline Linux kernel, including drivers? Which version?

* Are all the onboard devices open firmware?

* Is it free of unwanted processors like Intel ME and AMD PSP?

* Is that a daughterboard? If so, is the daughterboard suitable as a module in production? If so, what is on the main board, other than connectors and passives?

* Is "full-size" PCIe 3.0 slot actually x16? (Hard to see the connector at 22s in the video.)

* How much RAM, and is it ECC? Upgradeable?

* The GPU is only suitable for, say, 1080p or 4K video playing, not for general-purpose or AI compute, correct?

naikrovek 2 days ago

I wish the “most powerful RISC-V” title would change hands more quickly.

Seems like we should be much further than we are today.

This board is touting incredible things like HDMI and dual gigabit Ethernet… it almost feels like they don’t want to be taken seriously, and that makes me sad.

Go faster. If you’re trying to keep excitement up by timing things, stop it. It is not working.

snvzz 2 days ago

Most developers would prefer the much cheaper MILK-V Jupiter, which has RVA22 and Vector 1.0, thus allowing them to work on writing vector code. The step above that is to wait for the next big thing (MILK-V Oasis).

Without RVA22 or Vector, most of these boards are bound to end up as build machines for Linux distributions.