HiFive Unleashed Review

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Review of HiFive Unleashed powered by the Slant community.

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What are the best completely open-source (considering even the bootloader, all drivers, availability of Gerber files, etc) active single board computer designs?

Pros

Pro
RISC-V

Completely open-source CPU architecture.

Pro
Expandable capability

Microsemi announced a “HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board” built on its PolarFire FPGA that adds PCIe and USB expansion for the RISC-V-based, Linux driven HiFive Unleashed SBC.

Source

Cons

Con
Expensive for early adopters

From the SiFive website:

"This board is intended for software developers, and as such we made decisions such as having 8GB DDR4 memory, a large SPI Flash, multiple headers and a high-speed FMC expansion port to maximize the development value of the board. Production costs are also relatively high in this early, limited volume build. We are working hard to bring down the cost in future boards to enable more developers with Linux-capable, Freedom Unleashed RISC-V SoCs."