As promised, SiFive has unveiled a new computer featuring the company’s SiFive FU740 processor based on RISC-V architecture.

The company, which has been making RISC-V chips for several years, is positioning its new SiFive HiFive Unmatched computer as a professional development board for those interested in working with RISC-V. But unlike the company’s other HiFive boards, the new Unmatched model is designed so that it can be easily integrated into a standard PC.

It’s a mini-ITX form-factor board with an ATX 24-pin power supply connector and:

  • 8GB 16GB* of DDR4 RAM (onboard)
  • M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 3 x4 slot for NVMe storage
  • PCIe Gen 3 x8 expansion slot
  • M.2 Key E slot for a wireless card
  • microSD card reader
  • 4 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A prots
  • microUSB port
  • Gigabit Ethernet

The whole thing is powered by a SiFive FU740 system-on-a-chip which is a 64-bit processor that features four SiFive U74 CPU cores and a single SiFive S7 embedded CPU cores.

SiFive says the system can support GNU/Linux distributions including Yocto, Debian, and Fedora.

The SiFive HiFive Unmatched costs $665 and will ship in the fourth quarter of 2020 first quarter of 2021.

*SiFive originally announced plans to ship the HiFive Unmatched with 8GB of RAM, but doubled that to 16GB. 

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6 replies on “SiFive’s RISC-V PC coming soon for $665”

  1. Anyone else got flashbacks from the “Arthur” RICS CPU AKA the PowerPC G3 AKA the PPC740. I know it’s been over two decades, hey, mine’s been living in the basement but it’s very much still alive and kicking. Then of course there’s your UNIX permissions #740 – full permissions for the owner, read-only for the group, and nothing for the other users. The FU is just the icing on the cake. I’ll have two 🙂

    1. The U74 is probably closest in micro-architecture to the PPC 603e. At a higher clock speed, of course.

  2. This is really called FU? I’m not sure how I’d feel about buying something when the company calls it that.

    1. Freedom Unleashed.

      Their microcontroller SoCs have numbers like FE-310 — Freedom Everywhere.

    1. U74 and U84 are core designs. A list of gates. They don’t have any particular process node. A SiFive customer could put them on a chip made in 180nm if they want, or 65, 28, … whatever suits the rest of their product.

      If SiFive has said which node the FU-740 SoC is made in then I’ve missed that. The FU-540 was 28nm and all FE-310’s have been 180nm I think.

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