Is Open Source RISC-V Ready to Take on Intel, AMD, and ARM in the Data Center? (FB)
Fabless RISC-V semiconductor company SiFive announced it's taking pre-orders through a campaign on Crowd Supply for HiFive Unleashed, a single-board computer (SBC) that runs Linux on the RISC-V-based quad-core 1.5GHz U540 system-on-a-chip, which the company announced in October. The campaign, which runs through March 15, has so far raised nearly $95,000, with orders due to be shipped on June 30. The silicon design isn't likely to end up in any commercial equipment anytime soon. But it's an important step for RISC-V, an architecture based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) principles. Many top-tier chipmakers are already invested in the architecture; the nonprofit RISC-V Foundation, founded in 2015, now has more than 75 corporate members, including names like Google, NVIDIA, Samsung, Rambus, Qualcomm, Western Digital, and IBM.