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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 05 2018, @03:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the HiFive-Unleashed dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Slowly but surely, RISC-V, the Open Source architecture for everything from microcontrollers to server CPUs is making inroads in the community. Now SiFive, the major company behind putting RISC-V c...

That's damned nifty but at a grand for a 1.5GHz system, I don't see them selling that many to consumers.

Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/02/03/sifive-introduces-risc-v-linux-capable-multicore-processor/


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Monday February 05 2018, @09:40AM (4 children)

    by Unixnut (5779) on Monday February 05 2018, @09:40AM (#633214)

    > That's damned nifty but at a grand for a 1.5GHz system, I don't see them selling that many to consumers.

    If I look at it as a direct comparison to AMD/Intel based on performance, then yeah, it seems a lot of money for what you are getting.

    For me however, the main reason to buy one of these is because it doesn't have a CPU built in rootkit like modern AMD and Intel do, that you can never be sure has been disabled and hasn't opened a backdoor to your entire system.

    So if you change the question to "Is 1 grand worth it for a system that is open architecture, and that isn't backdoored in silicon" I think you may find there is quite a larger market for it. I sure would consider it, perhaps not to replace all my machines, but maybe one or two for really sensitive stuff. Bonus points if it uses the good old simple BIOS rather than that horrible monstrosity that is UEFI.

    The only reason I am not doing so atm is because my hardware is old enough to not be heavily affected by the latest security violations (Not a single one of my machines even has UEFI yet). Hopefully in time their prices will drop, making it more affordable for everyday use.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @11:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 05 2018, @11:05AM (#633230)

    If that's your only concern, then you can probably save a good bit of dosh by going with one of AMD or Intel's pre-ME offerings, and get better performance to boot.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 05 2018, @01:36PM (2 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday February 05 2018, @01:36PM (#633265) Homepage Journal

    At this point, my phone's more powerful. This is well and truly a development board. There's no good enough reason to buy one at this price point except that you need to already be writing code for it so you're ready to release once something consumers can afford is released.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Monday February 05 2018, @02:04PM (1 child)

      by Unixnut (5779) on Monday February 05 2018, @02:04PM (#633269)

      Yeah, but your phone is also riddled with binary blobs and god knows what else. I sure don't trust my phone with any sensitive information (if it were possible I wouldn't even keep my contact list on it, but if I go that far, I might as well not bother with a smartphone at all).

      Thing is, no open architecture systems are available now apart from this one. Even the raspberry pi has low level binary blobs to function. While I agree at this price point it could be considered a bit steep, I am hopeful with time prices will drop. Especially as one of the big HDD manufacturers plans to use the RISC-V chip in their disks.