Hi, SoC made by a company in a non-friendly country may raise some concerns to some users. I wonder if there is any plan to release an in-house SoC or a SoC made by a trusted company.
It is probably hard to find any low cost consumer board that wasn’t manufactured in China. If you are willing to pay more, there are non-China options.
There were plans to release a SOC made by Intel, but Intel apparently decided to end that relationship.
Otherwise, MicroChip (in Arizona) makes SOCs using SiFive cores. These are embedded cores not consumer grade cores though. For instance, they have rad-hardened chips and boards with automotive CAN ports on them. But they have an announced chip PIC64HX1000 expected to sample next year that has 8 SiFive X280 cores with vector support, plus a system core and a security core so 10 cores total. The eval board for this will probably cost several thousand USD which is OK for industrial applications but not a consumer grade board.
https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/10/28/microchip-pic64hx1000-64-bit-ai-mpu-delivers-post-quantum-security-for-aerospace-defense-and-automotive-applications/
They have other eval boards currently available using U54 cores, e.g. Unleashed class performance, which is nowhere near the Premier P550 or PIC64HX1000 performance, but they are available today and only cost a few hundred USD. See for instance the CURIOSITY-PIC64GX1000-KIT-ES. And these are embedded boards, so don’t expect any Linux distros to support them, other than OpenEmbedded. Also, I don’t know where all of the chips are fabbed, so I can’t guarantee that there are no Chinese parts on the eval boards. But NASA is planning to buy RISC-V parts from MicroChip so presumably they should be good enough for your purposes.
FYI, The Curiosity PIC64GX1000 Kit ES can run Linux distro, but yes, it’s probably much slower than the Unmatched:
And the PIC64HX1000 eval board
seems to be targeting network switch applications, and it’s not for SBCs.
We are not discussing or announcing future boards at this time, the P500 Boards are manufactured by our partner ESWIN in China and are available globally through Arrow.com.