The first production RISC-V workstation?

No, not the RiscPC, a RISC-V PC. And, not counting the various one-offs, it appears to be the very first production RISC-V workstation available. SiFive is announcing the RISC-V PC at the Linley Group Fall Virtual Processor Conference, based on the Freedom U740 ("FU740") to be introduced at the same time next month.

Precious little details are available, such as loadout, options, availability and most of all cost, but when has that stopped us from idly speculating before, eh? It is virtually certain the machine will be composed largely of off-the-shelf components other than the CPU, which is the real mystery of interest. The FU740 appears to be an evolution of the FU540, which is a 64-bit 1.5GHz+ part with four U54 "little" cores combined with one S1-series "big" core and 2MB of L2 cache on a 28nm process. Plainly, neither of these cores are even remotely in the ballpark with OpenPOWER: SiFive quotes CoreMark/MHz scores of 3.01 for both the U54 and S54, whereas the POWER9 easily achieves over 160. While the FU740 will almost certainly be faster due to its probable basis on the U74, it is difficult to imagine that the performance gulf will be narrowed significantly (the U74 edges up to around 5). You should not buy one and expect it to compare favourably with x86 or a Raptor system.

On the other hand, there's a good chance this will be another truly open system based on the fact that the Freedom E300 and U500 series are open source under the Apache license. While some parts of SiFive are proprietary, this line is not, and we presume that the U700 series will be likewise. RISC-V still lacks firm specs for vector and bit manipulation instructions, and this certainly hurts them for desktop and mobile applications, but this is a known deficiency and is being worked on. Assuming no shenanigans with the firmware, there's encouraging potential even in this early form.

I'm unambiguously on Team Power because of my long history with the architecture, but this blog is certainly interested in all kinds of free vendor-unencumbered computing, and this machine may well represent another such system. And it's newsworthy as the first RISC-V system that's at least workstation form factor even if its likely performance doesn't currently make it a credible daily driver. But maybe that's not the point: the point is to get developers on the architecture in a way that's bigger than an evaluation board (cf. Linus Torvalds and ARM), meaning it doesn't have to be their only daily driver; it just has to "be there" so people think about it. More on cost and specs and "how open is it" when we actually see it in October.