[baobrien]

AFAIK, SiFives business is about selling their RISC-V cores and ASIC consulting services. RISC-V is still kind of new as far as hard silicon Linux-capable cores go. My understanding is that this thing is meant to serve as a dev kit for their U74 core and U740 SoC platform, provide hardware for interested-enough Linux kernel devs and distro maintainers, and serve as a real, up-for-sale RISC-V board with a real SoC, 'all the fixins', and no FPGA. That's to say it's not a board for people who'd otherwise buy a RasPI or slightly more expensive SBC -- It's closer to a proof of concept.

[rbanffy]

We’ve been through this here on HN. The board is designed around a chip that really wants to be a router. This is a bit expensive for a desktop workstation and will cater to people really determined to make this the year of the RISC-V desktop rather than the average developer, such as myself, who, while considering x86s disgusting, still buys them because they are cost-effective.

[rjsw]

Why do you feel this is optimized as a router, are you mixing it up with the SolidRun HoneyComb ARM system ?

[rbanffy]

Oops... I think I did. Sorry.

[threshold]

Why is X86 disgusting?

[infamouscow]

It's a matter of taste, but x86 has a lot of historical cruft because it's been around long enough to see 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit industry transitions. Off the top of my head, x86 memory segmentation and fragmentation between BIOS vs. UEFI and ACPI vs. the absence of device trees (AFAIK).

[mrlonglong]

But it is kinda cool to run software that originally was built for the 8088 on an AMD Threadripper. But yes, I do agree the x86 architecture is fast losing its lustre.

[mhh__]

Ugly ugly ugly ISA. We throw away a little bit of performance and a lot of power because of how weird and old it is.