from Hacker News

SiFive Introduces 7 Series RISC-V Cores with E7, S7 and the U7 Series

by pepsi on 11/2/18, 4:56 AM with 47 comments

  • by gnulinux on 11/2/18, 5:27 AM

    When can I buy an affordable, complete RISC-V computer? I've been long planning to cook my own with FPGA but it seems like soon we'll start getting affordable RISC-V CPUs with other utility support?

  • by mhb on 11/2/18, 1:06 PM

    HiFive1 - Arduino RISC-V Dev Board

    The HiFive1 is a low-cost, Arduino-compatible development board featuring the Freedom E310 making it the best way to start prototyping and developing your RISC‑V applications. Not only can the HiFive1 help build RISC-V platforms, but it is also the first commercially available option to do so! The HiFive1 can simply be plugged into your computer via the micro USB port located to the front of the board. Additionally, the HiFive1 comes programmed with a simple bootloader and a demo software, that way you aren’t restricted to the Arduino IDE if you don’t choose to do so.

    https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15026

  • by PinkMilkshake on 11/2/18, 6:30 AM

    I've only had a passing interest in learning assembly. It's always been in the "maybe one day" category.

    But after learning about how small the RISC-V instruction set is (less than 50 apparently, but I can't find a citation for that anywhere), I'm far more motivated to get into it.

  • by jbeard4 on 11/2/18, 5:18 AM

    I am pretty excited about RISC-V. Hoping to see a v8 JavaScript and Node.js port in the future.

  • by brianolson on 11/2/18, 3:26 PM

  • by aidenn0 on 11/2/18, 3:38 PM

    The M7 is an out-of-order processor, these all look to be in-order. Many artificial benchmarks (including Dhrystone) are very forgiving of in-order stages, so I would expect this to underperform relatively to a similarly benchmarked M7.

  • by ivoras on 11/2/18, 1:57 PM

    Hmm, does it really have only 16 KiB of RAM or am I misinterpreting the spec?

    What would be the use case for a 320 MHz processor with 16 KiB RAM? Even ESP8266 has 80 KiB and runs at 80 MHz.

  • by jabl on 11/3/18, 12:41 PM

    Is this based on the open source rocket chip, or is it a proprietary design?