SiFive HiFive Unmatched Hands-On, Initial RISC-V Performance Benchmarks - Phoronix
A few weeks ago I finally received the HiFive Unmatched from SiFive as their flagship RISC-V development board. As a reminder this is their mini-ITX development board that is powered by their U740 SoC and features 16GB of DDR4 system memory, one PCI Express x16 slot that can work with AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux, and other features. It's been a delight playing with this developer platform and enclosed are some early benchmarks as well showing off the U740 performance as well as how the Linux software support/performance has been evolving.
The SiFive HiFive Unmatched is what many developers and enthusiasts have long been waiting for and began shipping this summer after being announced at the end of last year. The mini-ITX board is powered by a 24-pin ATX power supply connection, the PCI Express x16 slot (at PCIe x8 speeds) can power a graphics card if wanting to use this board as a workstation, 16GB of DDR4 is sufficient for most of today's development needs, there is integrated Gigabit Ethernet, both microSD and NVMe M.2 storage support, one M.2 E-key slot for WiFi/Bluetooth, and four USB 3.2 Gen1 ports.
The HiFive Unmatched is quite a capable board for those wanting to dabble with early RISC-V development work and other bring-up for this very promising ISA. Pricing on the HiFive Unmatched is at $665 USD, which certainly isn't at Raspberry Pi level pricing, but not too bad either considering the limited production and this board's specs. Hopefully with time SiFive will be able to produce a more value optimized board for those wishing to experiment with RISC-V on a greater budget -- well, SiFive also has their Inventor Kit for getting kids involved with (RISC-V) programming.
