SiFive HiFive Premier P550
SiFive recently launched the highly anticipated HiFive Premier P550 development board, which is their latest RISC-V offering, featuring four RISC-V cores, an Imagination AXM-8-256 integrated GPU, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a PCIe x16 slot, and 16GB or 32GB of RAM. The HiFive Premier P550 is a modern RISC-V development board suitable for desktops, development boards, and set-top boxes, with prices starting at $399. Let’s take a look at the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 and compare its performance with other popular single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi.
Five years ago, SiFive launched the HiFive Unmatched, the first interesting RISC-V development board. It was quite good at the time, even though RISC-V software support was more primitive than it is now, but it came with 16GB of RAM and a dedicated graphics card. Over the past few months, SiFive has been working on the HiFive Premier, their latest development board, which features their latest P550 RISC-V core and better specifications compared to previous boards.
Compared to the HiFive Unmatched, the HiFive Premier P550 has a faster RISC-V CPU core, an option for 32GB of RAM, and a more competitive price, starting at $399 (or $499 for the model with 16GB LPDDR5 RAM). The HiFive Premier P550 features 128GB eMMC storage, an Imagination integrated graphics processor, an internal NPU (Neural Processing Unit) with approximately 20 TOPS, Gigabit Ethernet, an M.2 Key E connector, and a PCIe x16 slot providing PCIe Gen3 x4 connectivity.
The SiFive HiFive Premier P550 comes pre-installed with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. As I demonstrated a few days ago while retesting the HiFive Unmatched, the performance of Ubuntu Linux on RISC-V has significantly improved.
My experience using the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 over the past few weeks has been pleasant; it is more powerful than the outdated HiFive Unmatched, and the RISC-V Linux ecosystem has also improved significantly over the past few years, including better optimizations, increased software package compatibility, and other enhancements.
Over the past few weeks, I have had the honor of using the SiFive HiFive Premier. Compared to other RISC-V boards like the StarFive VisionFive 2, the HiFive Premier stands out.
To better understand the performance of the SiFive HiFive Premier P550, I conducted benchmark tests and compared it with the ARM-based Raspberry Pi 400 (RPi 4) and Raspberry Pi 500 (RPi 5), while also testing the SiFive HiFive Unmatched. Both SiFive HiFive development boards run Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to showcase the current RISC-V Linux experience. Based on this, dozens of benchmark tests were conducted to compare the performance of the HiFive Premier P550 with the HiFive Unmatched and assess the gap with ARM Cortex processor-based competitors in the Raspberry Pi series.
libavif comparison
C-Blosc
As can be seen from the beginning, the performance of the new SiFive HiFive Premier P550 is significantly faster than the previous HiFive, achieving up to 2-3 times better performance depending on the workload. The RISC-V CPU has made tremendous progress over the past few years. However, it is also evident that the performance of the P550 still lags behind that of ARM CPUs, even achieving performance levels that can be twice that of the P550 when using the previous generation Raspberry Pi 4 (400).
In addition to being a significant upgrade from the previous generation SiFive HiFive, the HiFive Premier P550’s four CPU cores run consistently at 1.4GHz, which is even more impressive compared to the Raspberry Pi 400’s maximum CPU frequency average of 1.7GHz and the Raspberry Pi 5 reaching 2.3GHz.
Timed
In terms of encoding tasks, the HiFive Premier P550 and Raspberry Pi 400 are nearly on par. For those looking to build RISC-V or CI/CD type machines without using cross-compilation or virtualization, the HiFive Premier P550 may be a suitable choice.
BYTE Unix Benchmark
C-Ray
The performance of the HiFive Premier P550 has seen a tremendous improvement compared to the HiFive Unmatched era.
CacheBench
7-Zip
RISC-V has yet to catch up with current ARM or x86_64 processors, but the performance of SiFive RISC-V has made significant progress over the past 4 to 5 years.
Others
The SiFive HiFive Premier P550 has been running on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for several weeks without any issues.
Sometimes, the performance gap between the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 and Raspberry Pi (ARM) can be attributed to the fact that there are currently not many software projects optimized for RISC-V. We will also see if the next generation of SiFive CPU core designs will indeed be better.
We hope to see the next generation of SiFive HiFive development boards released again in 4-5 years.
Conclusion
From these performance test results, it is evident that the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 has significantly improved compared to the HiFive Unmatched RISC-V development board released in 2018. The RISC-V CPU design has made great strides, and the RISC-V software ecosystem is continuously improving. Compared to the performance of the HiFive Unmatched, the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 sometimes achieves performance levels that are even up to one hundred times better. However, in terms of performance, compared to ARM architecture Raspberry Pi 4/Pi 5 SBCs, the performance varies under certain workloads, with the SiFive P550 even outperforming the Raspberry Pi 4 (400) in some cases.
The performance of the HiFive Premier P550 compared to ARM SoCs Raspberry Pi is also impressive, as it maintains a consistent operating frequency of 1.4GHz across its four cores (in contrast, the Raspberry Pi 4 is about 1.7GHz, while the Raspberry Pi 500 reaches 2.3GHz).
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