HiFive Premier P550 mini-DTX motherboard features ESWIN EIC7700X RISC-V AI SoC, up to 32GB DDR5, a PCIe x16 slot

SiFive HiFive Premier P550 is a mini-DTX (203 x 170mm) motherboard powered by a 1.4 GHz ESWIN EIC7700X quad-core RISC-V SiFive P550 SoC with up to 19.95 TOPS of AI performance, and equipped with up to 32GB LPDDR5 memory and a 128GB eMMC flash all soldered on a system-on-module.

The motherboard itself features a SATA III connector for data storage, includes an HDMI 2.0 port for 4K video output, a PCIe Gen3 x16 slot (working at x4), two gigabit Ethernet ports, an M.2 Key-E socket to add a WiFi/Bluetooth card, up to five USB interfaces, and more.

HiFive Premier P550 specifications:

• SoC – ESWIN EIC7700X
  • CPU
    • 4x SiFive Performance P550 RV64GC RISC-V cores @ 1.4GHz (up to 1.8GHz when overclocked) with Cortex-A75-class performance
    • 32KB(I) + 32KB(D) L1 Cache
    • 256KB L2 Cache
    • 4MB shared L3 Cache
    • Cache supports ECC (support SECDED)
  • NPU (Not currently supported in software) – Up to 19.95 TOPS in INT8, 9.975 TOPS in INT16, and 9.975 FTOPS in FP16
  • Vision Engine
    • HAE (2D Blit, Crop, Resize, Normalization)
    • Imagination AXM-8-256 3D GPU (support OpenGL-ES 3.2, EGL 1.4, OpenCL 1.2/2.1 EP2, Vulkan 1.2, Android NN HAL)
    • OSD (3 layers)
  • Vision DSP – DSPs single cluster; support 512 INT8 SIMD
  • Multimedia Decoder/Encoder (not supported by the software at this time)
    • HEVC (H.265) and AVC (H.264) supported
    • H.265 up to 8K @ 50fps or 32 channels of 1080p30 video decoding
    • H.265 up to 8K @ 25fps or 13 channels of 1080p30 video encoding
    • JPEG ISO/IEC 10918-1, ITU-T T.81, up to 32K x 32K
• System Memory
  • 16GB LPDDR5 @ 6400 MT/s (HF106-000 development kit)
  • 32GB LPDDR5 @ 6400 MT/s (HF106-001 development kit)
• Storage
  • 128 GB eMMC 5.1 flash to boot the OS
  • SATA3 connector (6 Gb/s)
  • 16MB SPI flash
  • 2Kbit EEPROM for manufacturing data)
  • microSD card connector
• Video output – HDMI 2.0 port
• Audio
  • Header for audio interface (front panel stereo line-out and line-in/microphone signals)
  • Rear panel stereo jack with microphone input
• Networking
  • 2x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 connectors
  • M.2 Key E socket for Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module (not included)
• USB
  • 2x stacked USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports
  • 19-pin male connector to support 2x USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports on front panel
  • Type-E connector to support USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C connector on front panel.
• Expansion
  • PCIe Gen 3.0 x16 slot with supports for x4 mode only
  • 40-pin peripheral I/O header
  • 1x I2C, 1x QSPI, 1x UART, 16x GPIO via other headers (I guess)
• Console – Ethernet RJ45 connector for remote board management using an onboard dedicated MCU
• Debugging
  • JTAG header
  • USB Type-C (USB 2.0 only) connector for UART/JTAG support through FT4232H UART/JTAG-USB bridge
• Misc
  • Mini-ITX case-compliant front panel connector
  • CR1220 battery holder for Real Time Clock (battery not included)
  • 3x fan headers
• Power Supply – 24-pin ATX power supply connector
• Dimensions – 203 x 170 mm (Mini-DTX form factor)

SiFive is collaborating with Canonical to port and maintain Ubuntu 24.04 with Linux 6.6 or later on the HiFive Premier P550 mini-DTX motherboard which also supports the Freedom U-SDK, OpenSBI, and U-Boot. The product brief also mentions “popular system developer packages”, GCC and LLVM toolchains, and performance tools for optimization.

As you’ll note in the specifications, there’s still more work to be done as the NPU and VPU are not supported at this stage, but it’s quite common on RISC-V platforms as we’ve seen in our recent reviews of RISC-V boards. But I guess that’s OK, as HiFive Premier P550 is sold as a development board.

Performance-wise, the new HiFive Premier P550 is about three times faster in GeekBench 6 than the HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard introduced in 2020 with a quad-core U74 RISC-V processor.

SiFive first unveiled the RISC-V mini-DTX motherboard last April with limited details but at the RISC-V Summit North America, the company announced an initial pre-release batch of 100 Yocto-ready boards (meaning headless unless a discrete GPU is connected) is available through Arrow Electronics for $599 (16GB RAM version), and Ubuntu-supported boards are scheduled in Q4 2024 with support for the integrated GPU and NPU. Note the Yocto board will be upgradeable to Ubuntu, as I understand it there should not be any major differences in terms of hardware, if any.

Additional information may be found on the product page.

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