I have one. I'm writing a Forth for it at the moment, using the ISA simulator as well. It's nice hardware in terms of looks/stability, has arduino compatible pin layout, etc.
It has a lot of Flash for your images or whatever but very little SRAM, even compared to e.g. the Arduino Zero. Only 16KB. So that's quite unfortunate. I only had a Uno R1 though, so it's an upgrade for me in every dimension.
The clock speed is very high comparatively so it could drive some things that may've been out of reach, but they aren't entirely clear on the power usage. The Dhrystone/mW metric is obviously very good but if you don't need raw speed and little SRAM, it's unclear how well it fares power-wise. You could probably get away with less.
The tooling seems to work fine, including the OpenOCD-based debugger (though it has some natural limitations), and compiler toolchain. It'll be nice when the binutils port is upstream so I can get rid of a custom build.
I don't know about the Arduino IDE support. I don't use it. While it's pin-compatible, most Arduino libraries probably need some light modifications to work with the HiFive1 so you can reliably use stock shields/extensions. They have some examples (e.g. Adafruit capacitive display library) on GitHub of doing this. So you can use it with existing stuff if you get your hands a little dirty.
There are no gerber files or masks or whatever I guess, though the RTL they use is available, and they do have directions on how to synthesize the RTL for a small Xilinx Artix FPGA to develop the chip. The FPGA is about $70 I think so you could also go that route and use the soft-core version, though only if you care about HDL.
It's all very new, e.g. the original Dhrystone port on GitHub was a bit busted, but they fixed it very fast. Expect some roughness, but it's mostly been smooth for me since I just use GDB/GCC, OpenOCD and the simulator.
I'd suggest buying it if you want to experiment with RISC-V, support the project, and play with the new tooling -- but probably not as an Arduino replacement, if you have something like a Zero already. Unless you're willing to get your hands dirty, which maybe you are!
It has a lot of Flash for your images or whatever but very little SRAM, even compared to e.g. the Arduino Zero. Only 16KB. So that's quite unfortunate. I only had a Uno R1 though, so it's an upgrade for me in every dimension.
The clock speed is very high comparatively so it could drive some things that may've been out of reach, but they aren't entirely clear on the power usage. The Dhrystone/mW metric is obviously very good but if you don't need raw speed and little SRAM, it's unclear how well it fares power-wise. You could probably get away with less.
The tooling seems to work fine, including the OpenOCD-based debugger (though it has some natural limitations), and compiler toolchain. It'll be nice when the binutils port is upstream so I can get rid of a custom build.
I don't know about the Arduino IDE support. I don't use it. While it's pin-compatible, most Arduino libraries probably need some light modifications to work with the HiFive1 so you can reliably use stock shields/extensions. They have some examples (e.g. Adafruit capacitive display library) on GitHub of doing this. So you can use it with existing stuff if you get your hands a little dirty.
There are no gerber files or masks or whatever I guess, though the RTL they use is available, and they do have directions on how to synthesize the RTL for a small Xilinx Artix FPGA to develop the chip. The FPGA is about $70 I think so you could also go that route and use the soft-core version, though only if you care about HDL.
It's all very new, e.g. the original Dhrystone port on GitHub was a bit busted, but they fixed it very fast. Expect some roughness, but it's mostly been smooth for me since I just use GDB/GCC, OpenOCD and the simulator.
I'd suggest buying it if you want to experiment with RISC-V, support the project, and play with the new tooling -- but probably not as an Arduino replacement, if you have something like a Zero already. Unless you're willing to get your hands dirty, which maybe you are!