SiFive Launches Early Access For Premier P550 RISC-V Developer Board

Prominent RISC-V protagonist SiFive has announced early access to its anticipated development board, built around the firm's P550 core design, with a broader release scheduled for December.

The HiFive Premier P550 board is available now, if you can call a pre-release batch of 100 boards with Yocto Linux making the product available. These have been dubbed the "Early Access Edition" and are ready to purchase through Arrow Electronics in the US for $599.

The broader release in December will come with a build of Canonical's Ubuntu 24.04 pre-installed instead, the company said. The Early Access boards will also be upgradable to Ubuntu.

SiFive HiFive Premier P550 4

The Premier P550 board is based on a system-on-chip (SoC) made by Beijing-based ESWIN Technology Group. The EIC7700X combines a cluster of four SiFive P550 cores clocked at 1.4 GHz with an AXM-8-256 GPU from Imagination Technologies and a neural processing unit (NPU) designed by ESWIN.

Alongside the SoC, the board features 16 or 32 GB of LPDDR5 memory and 128 GB of eMMC storage, plus a range of I/O including HDMI 2.0 display output, 2x 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports, various USB ports, and a 40-pin I/O header giving access to I2C, SPI, UART, and GPIO signals from the SoC.

However, a note in the product brief for the HiFive Premier P550 reveals that some features such as the NPU, a digital signal processor, and a security subsystem are not currently enabled in software.

But SiFive is naturally keen to talk up the HiFive Premier P550, touting it as "the highest-performing RISC-V development board available." The product was first mentioned earlier this year after the company was forced to rethink because Intel discontinued its own RISC-V efforts, including an SoC that SiFive was planning to use for a different developer system.

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"We know many developers are eager to get their hands on this powerful new board, so we decided to release a limited Early Access Edition," enthused Martyn Stroeve, SiFive's Head of the HiFive board program. "At the same time, we are finalizing the software stack for the December release, which we believe will deliver unmatched performance and usability for developers."

Stroeve also said that the company is creating an entirely new series of HiFive boards offering varying performance levels, capabilities such as scalar and vector computing, and different price points.

The HiFive Premier P550 will also be on show in the Developer Zone at the RISC-V Summit North America in Santa Clara this week.

RISC-V is of course an open instruction set architecture that is available royalty-free for anyone to design a processor around, with SiFive being one of the most prominent fabless design companies involved in the ecosystem.

The company last year laid off 20 percent of its workforce as part of a realignment effort from its previous strategy of building SoCs and boards itself to collaborating with partners to deliver the SoCs and boards while it focuses on the core designs. ®