OnChip and SiFive, two groups aiming to develop and release RISC-V platforms, have announced they will collaborate. From OnChip's crowdfunding campaign:
Ever since SiFive's HiFive1 campaign was launched just a week after we launched Open-V back in November, we've both been getting a lot of questions about how we might collaborate. It's taken a while, as these things do, but we finally have a concrete answer we think will benefit everyone, not least the RISC-V community. Here's how we're collaborating:
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Open-V Will Use the SiFive E31 CPU Coreplex
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All Open-V Peripherals Will Be Compatible with SiFive Chips
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SiFive Will Donate Wafer Space in a May 2017 Tapeout
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OnChip Will Contribute to the Free Chips Project
Sounds like good news for those hoping for RISC-V and open hardware designs to become tangible objects.
Note that the SiFive HiFive1 campaign was successful and has already shipped to some backers while the OnChip OPEN-V campaign looks like it will not reach its goal.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Tuesday January 31 2017, @07:05AM
Around here (after one very loud rant quite a few years ago) that's known as Mehra's Law - "There is no amount of raw hardware performance that cannot be pissed away by shitty software."