FOSOH-V Unveils Cluster-Friendly SAVVY-V PolarFire RISC-V Development Board Design
Heading to production later this year, the SAVVY-V cluster board packs in high-speed network connectivity and stacks six high.
UPDATE (8/18/20): Ali Uzel is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign to produce the SAVVY-V, a RISC-V development board designed with Linux support in mind and based around Microchip's PolarFire SoC and FPGA combination.
Uzel has confirmed the specifications of the cluster-centric development board, pointing out it offers more memory, more storage, and faster interconnections than competition like the PolarBerry and Microchip's own Icicle Development Kit.
Pricing for the board, however is still up in the air. "SAVVY-V will be correspondingly more expensive [than PolarBerry or the Icicle]," Uzel warns, "though I don’t know the exact pricing yet due to the fact Polarfire SoC pricing is not yet publicly available."
More information, and a link to sign up to be notified when the campaign goes live, can be found on Crowd Supply.
Original article continues below...
Ali Uzel has shared details of a high-throughput RISC-V cluster development platform, the SAVVY-V, under development by a group calling itself FOSOH-V — Flexible Open Source Hardware for RISC-V.
According to details of the project sent by Uzel to CNX Software, the SAVVY-V is based on a Microsemi PolarFire FPGA RISC-V FPGA system-on-chip (SoC), the MPFS250T, with four 64-bit RISC-V cores running at up to 667MHz and a smaller fifth RISC-V "monitor" core. The underlying fabric connects two SFP+ cages for two 10Gb/s network connections, which are operable alongside two gigabit Ethernet ports.
The board also includes six USB Type-C ports along one edge, and offers a PC/104+ connector for stacking up to six boards tall — creating the promised SAVVY-V cluster system. Each board has 250k logic elements of FPGA space, up to 4GB of 32-bit LPDDR4 running at 3,200Mb/s for the main processors, and up to 2GB of 16-bit 1,333Mb/s LPDDR3 for the programmable switch fabric, along with up to 1Gb of NOR flash storage and support for 1TB of storage via four eMMC 5.1 connectors.
The board is claimed to measure 18x12x2cm (around 7x4.7x0.8") and draw 20W under load, offering dual power inputs for redundancy. What Uzel hasn't shared, however, is pricing information, though he has claimed the board will be open hardware; Altium-format schematics are available upon request, but have not been released publicly.
More information on the project is available in the FOSOH-V LinkedIn group, where Uzel is claiming the board will be produced before the end of the year.