Intel demos “Horse Creek” developer board with SiFive RISC-V CPU, DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0 slot

Back in August, Intel was announcing expanded support for RISC-V via the Linux-based Pathfinder development kits featuring SiFive processors, mentioning that these should be released later this year. At the recent Intel Innovation 2022 event, the first developer boards codenamed “Horse Creek” were showcased with quite a few features in premiere for the RISC-V architecture.

As noted by WikiChip, the Horse Creek dev board designed for hobbyists as well as commercial chipmakers resemble a Raspberry Pi board, but it is considerably larger due to the inclusion of numerous interfaces like 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, a PCIe 5.0 slot, and ATX power connector and an SD card slot. At the heart of the board lies a SoC with 4x SiFive P550 RISC-V cores running at 2.2 GHz. This chip has been manufactured on Intel 4 - currently Intel’s most advanced production node.

The dev board also comes with a host of 3rd-party controllers and debugging interfaces and the SoC links all these to Intel’s own IP PHYs, proving that the RISC-V ecosystem can bring together various industry standards under one umbrella. Apart from the SiFive cores, the 4 mm x 4 mm monolithic die integrates Intel’s PCIe 5.0 PHY with eight lanes and Synopsys PCIe 5.0 controller, as well as Intel’s DDR5 PHY supporting 5600 MT/s speeds plus a Cadence DDR5 controller. Intel also offers complete access to its most advanced Intel 4 IPs, including 2 MB shared SRAM compiler, process monitor, caches, power / clock / PLLs, JTAG, plus peripheral interfaces.

There is no integrated GPU for now, but RISC-V-infused graphics should soon be available from Imagination Technologies. The Horse Creek board uses only the CPU cores to execute videogames or video decoding.

It looks like Intel is still targeting availability for late 2022, yet no pricing info has been revealed.

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