‘First RISC-V-pc’ contains soc with five cores on mini-itx board

Chip company SiFive has announced the ‘first RISC-V PC’. The HiFive Unmatched is a mini-itx board with pentacore-soc based on RISC-V, aimed at software development.

The basis of the HiFive Unmatched development board is the Freedom U740-soc with four U74 cores and an S7 core. HiFive has already implemented the vector extension instruction set of RISC V with this soc, although it is still a draft. RISC-V is an open source isa that aims to make CPU designs freely available under a BSD license. The Unmatched development board also contains 8GB DDR4, PCIe 3.0, gigabit ethernet and USB 3.2 Gen 1. The board measures 170x170mm.

Western Digital and Samsung, among others, are working on RISC-V chips. Western Digital for its storage products, Samsung is working with HiFive on chips for internet-of-things, automotive and 5G, but HiFive also wants to bring RISC-V to PCs or even supercomputers, among other things. The company wants to help other companies design and develop an ecosystem to make chip development cheaper, faster and easier.