The Freedom U540 is a microprocessor using the

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five") is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established reduced instruction set computer (RISC) principles. The project commenced in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley. It transfer ...

open architecture by fabless semiconductor company

SiFive SiFive, Inc. is an United States, American Fabless manufacturing, fabless semiconductor company and provider of commercial RISC-V processors and Integrated circuit, silicon chips based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). Its product ...

that is used to power the

HiFive Unleashed The HiFive Unleashed, or HFU is a discontinued single-board computer development board created by SiFive with the intention to increase exposure and adoption of the open-source hardware, open-source RISC-V architecture. The HFU is capable of runn ...

computer. The U540 is one of the first commercially available microprocessors to use the RISC-V architecture, which is in contrast to the majority of the market, which uses mostly proprietary

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. Th ...

and

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between ...

microarchitectures. As the U540 was designed specifically for the HFU, it is not available on other devices or as a standalone component. The U540 has a partial compatibility with

coreboot coreboot, formerly known as LinuxBIOS, is a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware designed to perform only the minimum number of tasks necessary to load and r ...

References

System on a chip RISC-V {{compu-hardware-stub