For those not in the know, HiFive Pro P550 is powered by a "Horse Creek" SoC, with a quad-core, 64-bit RISC-V design. The SoC features private L2 memory, with 128KB allocated to each core. The 2MB L3 cache is shared among the four cores. The SoC operates at speeds of more than 2GHz, according to Intel and the whole lot is built by Intel Foundry Services on the Intel 4 process.

Intel principal engineer Nikhil Krishna Gopalakrishna said: "When we first looked at this opportunity with RISC-V, our first thought was: Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the developer. What do they need to develop software?"

"The core is fantastic; now let's bring together the most important peripherals around it to enable good ecosystem development."

The board has a microATX form factor (244mm x 244mm) and 16GB of onboard DDR5-5600 memory. Also included are two PCIe 5.0 expansion slots, integrated graphics, 10 GbE, and eight USB ports (two USB 2.0 and six USB 3.0). There are also two M.2 expansion slots (2230 and 2280).

SiFive director Sam Grove said that the release of the board will push RISC-V software development to new levels

"This is really for people building software, packaging software and distributing software to the rest of the ecosystem."

Intel sees the HiFive Pro P550 development board targeting premium software development, developer desktops, and RISC-V rack systems. However, given that the HiFive Pro P550 is aimed at the developer community, there needs to be a word on pricing for everyday users looking to get their paws on it.

SiFive's next-generation RISC-V products include the P670 and its low-power companion chip, the P470, aimed at next-generation wearables and smart consumer devices. The P670 will be built on a 5nm process node and will feature clock speeds of 3.4GHz+.