SiFive Unveils the HiFive Premier P550, the First Commercially Available Out-of-Order RISC-V Development Board

HiFive Premier P550 is the highest performance RISC-V development board on the market, offering developers unmatched flexibility and performance

NUREMBERG, Germany-- April 09, 2024 -- Today at Embedded World, SiFive, Inc., the pioneer and leader of RISC-V computing, unveiled its new state-of-the-art RISC-V development board, the HiFive™ Premier P550. The board will be available for large-scale deployment through Arrow Electronics so developers around the world can test and develop new RISC-V applications like machine vision, video analysis, AI PC and others, allowing them to use AI and other cutting-edge technologies across many different market segments.

With a quad-core SiFive Performance™ P550 processor, the HiFive Premier P550 is the highest performance RISC-V development board in the industry, and the latest in the popular HiFive family. Designed to meet the computing needs of modern workloads, the out-of-order P550 core delivers superior compute density and performance in an energy-efficient area footprint. Furthermore, the modular design of the HiFive Premier P550, which includes a replaceable system-on-module (SOM) board, gives developers the flexibility they need to tailor their designs.

“The popularity of our development boards underscores the growth and maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem,” said Patrick Little, CEO and Chairman at SiFive. “The HiFive board has always been the ‘golden reference’ RISC-V development platform. Building on this proven foundation with the new HiFive Premier P550, developers can take advantage of SiFive’s high-performance IP in a cost-efficient platform that will be available in volume, opening up unlimited possibilities for RISC-V innovation in AI applications and beyond.”

SiFive is collaborating with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, to ensure that developers can smoothly run the Linux distribution on the HiFive Premier P550. Ubuntu is free to use and comes with five years of free security maintenance for the operating system. Developers and innovators can rely on Ubuntu’s stable and secure platform to access the open source software ecosystem, and get access to bug fixes and security updates for 10+ years backed by Canonical’s enterprise-grade support.

“RISC-V is giving developers a new level of freedom to innovate, and SiFive is one of the top companies leading the charge. The availability of HiFive Premier P550 is a significant milestone for the RISC-V development community,” said Gordan Markuš, Silicon Alliances Director at Canonical. “Thanks to our collaboration with SiFive, developers using the HiFive Premier P550 board will be able to innovate at speed with Ubuntu. Additionally, Canonical’s software and services will accelerate time to market, and ensure long-term support and security maintenance for our enterprise partners.”

Technical Features

The Eswin EIC7700 SoC found on the board features a high performance 64-bit three-issue, out-of-order, SiFive RISC-V P550 core complex configured with four P550 cores, 256KB L2 cache and 4MB L3 cache. The SoC features a 2D/3D GPU, hardware video encoder/decoder, NPU, DSP, MIPI DSI, a security subsystem, an integrated high speed DDR5 memory controller, root complex PCI Express Gen 3 x4 and standard peripherals.

Other features include:

• 16 GB of 64-bit LPDDR5-6400 memory, 128 GB of eMMC memory for fast boot
• High speed interconnects with PCI Express Gen3 x4 via a PCIe x16 slot
• 5 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports for peripheral connectivity
• Software support with Freedom U-SDK, including Linux
• Replaceable SOM for flexibility in design

SiFive’s lineup of development boards also includes the popular HiFive Unmatched Rev. B, which is available today. To help streamline the development process, SiFive provides comprehensive documentation, software development kits, toolchains, utilities, and software ecosystem solutions for each SiFive RISC-V development board.

The HiFive Premier P550 is expected to be available through Arrow Electronics in July 2024. Pre-orders can be placed at www.arrow.com. To learn more, please visit: https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-premier-p550.

About SiFive

As the pioneers who introduced RISC-V to the world, SiFive is transforming the future of compute by bringing the limitless potential of RISC-V to the highest performance and most data-intensive applications in the world. SiFive’s unrivaled compute platforms have enabled leading technology companies around the world to innovate, optimize and deliver the most advanced solutions of tomorrow across every market segment of chip design, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, automotive, data center, mobile, and consumer. With SiFive, the future of RISC-V has no limits.