SiFive recently sent over a review sample of the much anticipated HiFive Premier P550 developer board, their newest RISC-V creation featuring four RISC-V cores, Imagination AXM-8-256 integrated GPU, Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe x16 slot, and 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The HiFive Premier P550 is a modern RISC-V developer board capable of desktop uses, developer build boxes, and similar with pricing starting out at $399 USD. Here is a look at the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 as well as comparison benchmarks of this RISC-V board to the popular Raspberry Pi single board computers.
Nearly five years ago SiFive launched the HiFive Unmatched as frankly the first interesting RISC-V developer board. It was nice for its time especially with RISC-V software support being more primitive than, but was nice with 16GB of RAM and allowing a discrete graphics card. The past number of months SiFive has been working on delivering the HiFive Premier as their newest development board featuring their newer P550 RISC-V cores and improved specs over their original developer board.
Over the HiFive Unmatched, the HiFive Premier P550 features much faster RISC-V CPU cores, the option of 32GB RAM, and the pricing is also more competitive in starting out at $399 USD (or $499 USD for the model with 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM). The HiFive Premier P550 features 128GB eMMC storage, Imagination integrated graphics, an integrated ~20 TOPS NPU, Gigabit Ethernet, an M.2 Key E connector, and a PCIe x16 slot providing PCIe Gen3 x4 connectivity.
The SiFive HiFive Premier P550 is compatible with mini-ITX cases and can be powered by a standard ATX power supply. There are also three fan headers on the board, 40-pin I/O header, and other connectivity options similar to the HiFive Unmatched.
