Back in October RISC-V minded startup SiFive announced the HiFive Unmatched development board as the best RISC-V development board we’ve seen to date. But only having 8GB of RAM was one of the few critiques which the company is now addressing.
The HiFive Unmatched as announced in October features the SiFive FU740 SoC with four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core. The board has a 32MB SPI flash chip, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, one PCI Express x16 slot (at x8 speeds), one NVMe M.2 slot, microSD, and Gigabit Ethernet. The HiFive Unmatched $665 USD price point is much better than the earlier HiFive Unleashed board price.
While socketed memory would be ideal with the development board, understandably that would add to the cost and also complexities around DRAM compatibility and certification. But rather than shipping with 8GB DDR4 as was expected, SiFive is now making all HiFive Unmatched boards ship with 16GB of DDR4 while maintaining the same launch price.