SiFive HiFive: The Vital Role of Development Boards in Growing The RISC-V Ecosystem + HiFive Premier P550 Update

By Martyn Stroeve - Senior Director, HiFive Programs, SiFive

October 22, 2024

Reflecting on how far we’ve come since SiFive launched the world’s first RISC-V development boards back in 2016, it’s clear we’ve been on an incredible journey together with the RISC-V software community. Those early boards, like the HiFive1, were game-changers—true ignitors for the entire RISC-V revolution. Since then, SiFive has continued to innovate, releasing new boards every 2 years, adding more performance and features, pushing the ecosystem forward.

When we launched the HiFive Unmatched Rev B in 2022, it quickly became the de facto choice for developers looking to create and optimize software for RISC-V. As the RISC-V market has expanded, and with more companies now producing boards, we’ve had to push ourselves even harder. For our next board, we have been focusing on quality, performance, and the developer experience. We are committed to ensuring our boards are the gold standard in the industry.

Providing a great out-of-the-box experience is a top priority. That’s why we’ve been taking some extra time with the upcoming HiFive Premier P550 Board. While we’re as eager as anyone to get this board into developers’ hands, we made the decision to ship with Ubuntu out of the box earlier in the year following several discussions with Canonical about how we could partner closer with them and create the best possible hardware and software combination with this exciting new board. The slight delay wasn’t a decision we made lightly, but we believe it was the best way to enhance the experience for the widest possible range of developers and ensure that everyone who buys this board has everything they need to hit the ground running. In addition, it will also allow us to keep these boards up to date via the built-in over-the-air (OTA) update capability, which is a great feature.

For those who aren’t familiar, the HiFive Premier P550 is a micro DTX form factor board that will be the highest performance RISC-V CPU development board in the world. Developed in partnership with ESWIN Computing, this board features a quad-core P550 configuration that offers roughly double the single-threaded performance of other RISC-V boards available today—and about three times the performance of our previous generation, the HiFive Unmatched. It’s a significant upgrade for developers, offering a fully featured PC-style board that’s convenient and easy to work with.

Our vision is to build a development board program that’s not just the best in the industry but a model for others to follow. The “HiFive” program has been highly successful, however, scaling it by solely making more boards in-house wasn’t the optimal path. That’s why we’ve shifted our focus to leveraging our great customer base, using their experience to translate our IP into SoCs to bring more capable HiFive boards to a wider audience and of relevance to more market segments, quicker.

The name "HiFive" is a subtle play on SiFive and a universal gesture of celebration and camaraderie. We like to think of it as us giving developers a “high five” for their amazing work expanding the possibilities of RISC-V. As we shift to a more partner-centric approach, we aim to be “HiFiving” with partners a lot more in the future!

A critical factor in RISC-V’s success in markets beyond simple embedded chips is the availability of optimized software, including hypervisors, operating systems, and middleware. SiFive is committed to supporting this by seeding units to select Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and exciting new projects managed by RISE. If you have a project you believe deserves board support, we would love to talk to you more.

Lastly, as we finalize the release of the HiFive Premier P550 development boards, we’re pleased to share that we have more future HiFive projects in the works with some amazing partners. Stay tuned for more updates!