With Canonical announcing Ubuntu support for so much new hardware, the announcement of Ubuntu ported to a new architecture can go unnoticed. But today, we have a big one. Working with the leading RISC-V core IP designer and development board manufacturer, SiFive, we are proud to announce the first Ubuntu release for two of the most prominent SiFive boards, Unmatched and Unleashed.
This is great news for RISC-V and open source hardware in general. Of course, Linux on RISC-V moves forward with or without the support or major distributions, but having Ubuntu, probably the most popular Linux distribution in the world, on board is a major boon for the architecture.
5-5’s 5-5 6-5 4’s…
God, these numbers are getting confusing.
$665 and five months wait for a mediocre ITX SoC. No thanks.
That’s clearly the cost for early adopters, but to be fair, the cost isn’t that high. A base AMD Ryzen system will run around $550 ($300 for a 5600X, $150 for ITX board, $100 for RAM), and this is in the same ball park. Compared to one of those fancy POWER boards, $665 is a steal. Also, I’m not sure where you got 5 month wait, Mouser has them in stock. Long lead time is only for large orders.
Personally, I would really like to get my hands on one of these, just haven’t had the free time to justify the purchase. I bought a $10 Pi Zero W a few months ago that only been booted once. I’m hoping things are going to get calmer in the second half of the year so that I can start working on some personal projects again.
The issue is that the Ryzen system obliterates the SiFive in performance and it costs $100 less.
I think the value proposition it’s even worse if you compare it against a Raspberry Pi system.
Sure RISC-V may be cool, but it is not paying 5x for the same performance of an ARM system cool.
AMD64 and ARM offer an order of magnitude better price /performance than RISC-V.
How many people really care about open platforms?
I care. I have the unmatched sitting on my desk and absolutely love it.
u-boot, UEFI bios, SD card for the OS. NVMe, PCIe.
It’s everything I wish ARM boards were. You ever try to develop for the ARM ecosystem? It’s a horrible unholy mess of SoC’s all wanting a different mix of random binary blobs to boot.
kallisti5,
+1 from me! ARM’s fragmentation is terrible. RISC-V is what ARM should have been.
I’d like RISC-V to grow and get better scales of economy so that it could become competitive, but part of me worries what large proprietary corporations will do. They could embrace RISC-V but turn it into a mess just like ARM. Nvidia is already using RISC-V cores in their proprietary GPUs where we’re not seeing the benefits of open hardware.
@Alfman
RISC-V is an open standard – not open hardware. It will probably become even more fragmented than ARM. Companies like HiFive have no hope of making a mainstream product.
Brisvegas,
I’m still holding out hope that we will get lots of open commodity hardware from RISC-V. If not in mobile, then at least for servers/SBC where there’s much more awareness about the importance of openness. Many of us are negatively impacted by mostly closed ARM hardware.
@Brisvegas
The Risc-v standard is similar in structure to the OpenGL standard. OpenGL didn’t suffer from fragmentation. There is a core which must be supported plus extensions. A large number of extensions found their way into the common standard much like patent pooling. Beyond a certain point it doesn’t make sense for IHV’s to deviate from the Risc-V standard unless they are building specialised proprietory solutions to problems which isn’t much different from single use products or niches today.
The ‘Unleashed ‘predecessor was 80-90% SLOWER than a $200 Jetson TX2 in Phoronix benchmarks,
Hifive always talks about performance per Watt – not outright performance.
Then connect it directly to the power outlet and let it scream its full power.
Current RISC-V cores are nowhere near the performance levels of high end out-of-order ARM or x86.
I think whatever adoption RISC-V may get, it will be mainly in the deeply embedded/IoT space.