SiFive released its HiFive Premier P550 Development Board (Fig. 1) targeted at embedded application developers. It leverages a quad-core RISC-V SoC from ESWIN Computing that incorporates an Imagination GPU and an ESWIN neural processing unit (NPU). The module plugs into the motherboard that implements a standard PC layout and power connection along with a PCI Express slot.
The miniDTX motherboard has a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports for the host and a remote debug Ethernet port. There are five exposed USB 3 ports plus a 6-GB/s SATA3 connection and an M.2 E-Key PCIe Gen 3 socket populated with a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module. The system comes installed with Ubuntu 24.04 and a complete tool suite to support native RISC-V development.
“The collaboration between ESWIN Computing, SiFive, and Canonical to bring Ubuntu 24.04 to the HiFive Premier P550 highlights the core values of RISC-V: openness and collaboration,” said Gordan Markuš, Director of Silicon Alliances at Canonical. “The HiFive Premier P550 stands out as the premium development board for enthusiasts and developers, helping drive the next wave of cutting-edge RISC-V development. We’re proud to see Ubuntu Linux as a key enabler of this innovation and development on the Premier P550 board.”
More RISC-V Articles
The ESWIN chip's (Fig. 2) RISC-V RV64GBC ISA core is based on SiFive's P550 architecture that implements a 13-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline. The module has 128 GB of eMMC flash memory and either 16 or 32 GB of DDR5 memory.
The compute engine includes the quad-core RISC-V processors, a DSP, and the NPU. Software support for the latter will be coming shortly. The NPU can deliver 19.95 TOPS for INT8-based machine-learning models. This includes large language model (LLM) support for frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and PaddlePaddle.
The SoC incorporates 8K 25-frame/s video encoders and 8K 50-frame/s decoders along with JPEG encode/decode and audio encode/decode that support standards like AAC.
The video interface features HDMI 2.0 with HDCP 1.4 and 2.2 support, MIPI-DSI, and LVDS along with MIPI CSI C/D camera inputs. There's a built-in image signal processing (ISP) unit. The Imagination GPU provides 2D and 3D support.
Secure boot with a trusted execution environment (TEE) are supported by the security engine. It has its own true random number generator (TRNG) plus 16 KB of one-time-programmable (OTP) memory.
The typical power requirement for the EIC7700X chip is 8 W.
