RISC-V chip design and IP powerhouse, SiFive, just announced availability of its new HiFive Premier P550 development board, and it’s sure to make waves at the RISC-V Summit this week in Santa Clara. The new board is being billed as the highest-performing RISC-V development vehicle to date. If you’re looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible with RISC-V, this could be the test and development platform you’ve been waiting for.
As of today, an Early Access Edition of the HiFive Premier P550 is available, which consists of an initial batch of 100 boards with Yocto Linux included, available through SiFive’s distribution partner Arrow Electronics. The broader launch is set for December, at which point the board will come pre-installed with Canonical Ubuntu 24.04, which should make getting started much easier for a wider range of developers.
“Since announcing the HiFive Premier P550 boards in April, we’ve worked closely with Canonical to deliver a best-in-class hardware and software experience,” said Martyn Stroeve, Head of the HiFive board program at SiFive.
What’s under the hood, you ask? The HiFive Premier P550 sports a quad-core SiFive Performance P550 processor running at 1.4GHz. SiFive’s 64-bit out of order RISC-V core architecture reportedly offers 3X the performance per square millimeter of silicon area versus Arm’s Cortex-A75 and significantly higher performance than any of SiFive’s previous offerings as well. Over the years, the company has become a clear leader in RISC-V architecture development and IP licensing, and it shows in the wide array of customers SiFive works with and the multiple platforms the company has made available.
This week, SiFive is giving attendees at the RISC-V Summit North America a closer look at its P550 development board, along with some of their other dev boards like the HiFive Unmatched rev B that’s based on the company’s Freedom U740 processor and fleshed out into a standard PC form factor.
What’s in the Box: HiFive Premier P550 Highlights
- Quad-core SiFive Performance™ P550 processor
- Memory options ranging from 16 to 32GB LPDDR5 / 128GB eMMC Storage
- Connectivity: SATA, PCIe, SD, M.2, USB 3
- Integrated graphics with an Imagination GPU and ESWIN Neural Processor
SiFive’s HiFive P550 board is the result of a collaboration with its board partner ESWIN Computing as well as Canonical, and it underscores the broader trend of industry players coming together to push RISC-V technology and adoption forward.
This also marks a change in strategy for SiFive. In lieu of producing its own next-generation development boards, the company is working closely with multiple partners to bring new products to market moving forward. I’m told the HiFive P550 is but one of multiple development platforms coming down the pipeline.
RISC-V Adoption Heats Up
In related news, in case you missed Samsung’s recent announcement, the company has begun bringing RISC-V to its Tizen platform for televisions, as the primary application processor, which is a very big deal. Samsung recently demonstrated one of its TV models running on SiFive’s P470 RISC-V-based processor core architecture. And there have been plenty of rumblings that Google is making a strong push into RISC-V development for Android devices as well, to align around the RVA23 profile in the future.
It’s clear that SiFive has thought through what developers need to bring their ideas to life on RISC-V. With Early Access Edition boards available now, it’s only a matter of time before they land on desks and in labs, sparking the next wave of RISC-V innovations. For those curious to learn more, you can check out the full details on the SiFive HiFive Premier P550.
