Back in February 2022 SiFive announced its partnership with Intel Foundry Services (IFS), to bring its "Horse Creek" SoC to market and now SiFive has announced that it's getting ready to launch its first development board on said SoC. This summer, SiFive will launch the HiFive Pro P550 development board, which will kick things up a serious notch when it comes to embedded SoC development boards, regardless of the CPU core the SoC is built around. The HiFive Pro P550 will be one of few microATX based embedded SoC development boards out there and so far, to our knowledge, the only one with a RISC-V based SoC. The Horse Creek SoC sports quad core, 2.2 GHz, 13-stage, triple-issue, out-of-order pipeline RISC-V RV64GBC CPU built on the Intel 4 node. The SoC also has a DDR5 5600 MHz memory interface, support for eight lanes of PCIe 5.0 and comes in a 19 x 19 mm FBGA package.

The HiFive Pro P550 will offer 16 GB of DDR5 memory, but based on the render of the motherboard, this is soldered to the board, rather than relying on standard DDR5 DIMMs. Furthermore, the board has two x16 PCIe 3.0 expansion slots, although it's unclear how many PCIe each slot features, as well as a PCIe 3.0 M.2 2280 M-key slot for NVMe SSDs and a PCIe 3.0 M.2 E-key slot for a WiFi/Bluetooth module. The board also sports multiple USB/USB 3.0 ports and even a pair of USB-C ports. The press release also mentions both Gigabit and 10 Gbps Ethernet support, as well as support for onboard graphics and remote system management, without going into any further details. It'll be interesting to see if the Horse Creek SoC can deliver on its expected performance target, especially as SiFive has a lot to prove, especially as the company calls the RISC-V architecture inevitable.