Computer Scientist Gets AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT Working on RISC-V PC

Computer scientist René Rebe has gotten an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT video card working on SiFive’s HiFive Unmatched-RISC-V PC. Before that, he says he spent ten hours patching the Linux kernel.

Through these patches, Rebe was able to add support for AMD’s desktop video card and the Mesa Gallium 21.1.5 driver to the Linux kernel, he explains in a YouTube video. With this he managed to get the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT working via the PCIe 3.0 slot of the HiFive Unmatched development board, which has eight usable PCIe 3.0 lanes.

René Rebe has not only used the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT to start up a Linux installation with a graphical interface. The computer scientist has also used the GPU to render hardware-accelerated 3D images and decode videos. It would be the first time that a desktop GPU has been combined with a RISC-V system. Rebe has not been able to use the gpu for playing games.

SiFive’s HiFive Unmatched development board is “the first RISC-V computer,” according to its creator. The system includes a Mini-ITX motherboard with integrated Freedom U740 soc, which features four SiFive U74 cores and a single SiFive S7 core. The system also has 16GB DDR4 memory, a PCIe 3.0 connector and two M.2 connections, which are used for an SSD and a WiFi module respectively. Furthermore, the development board has four USB 3.2 Gen 1 connections, an RJ45 connector for gigabit Ethernet and a microSD card reader.

The system supports Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora, and Yocto and has a suggested retail price of $665. SiFive introduced the HiFive Unmatched development board in October last year and shipped the first systems to users at the end of June. The system was released as a developer platform. Thus, the product is not intended for regular consumer desktop use.