Please forgive my ignorance but I am interested in understanding how the CPU is cooled. I was terribly disappointed by the noise my Unmatched board makes and I am hoping that the P550 has a better cooling solution, or at least compatibility with off the shelf heatsink+fans. Does anyone know how this board is cooled?
There is a fan heatsink combination on the P550 ASIC but the fan is much quieter than Unmatched 25mm diameter fan. The P550 fan is 50mm diameter and the fan heatsink combination is larger and more efficient. I’m not aware of an industry standard for the fan heatsink combination.
Thanks, I’m glad to hear that it’s an improvement. I don’t believe there is an industry standard either. I was more thinking of HSF mounting compatibility with commodity consumer grade parts - like Intel LGA or AMD AM CPU sockets.
I was there in the Sifive booth during RV summit in the past 3 days. They showcased the board, and I didn’t notice any fan noise in the hall room. It’s definitely much better than Unmatched (I had to buy another quieter fan for that) here’s photo I took for your reference
I just powered up my board. The fan is fairly quiet. It should be tolerable for most folks (the Unmatched fan didn’t bother me, but I used to code on factory floors back in the day ). It changes speed a lot, which is a little annoying.
We had options for much smaller heatsinks and fans, but decided to just keep the rather oversized and ugly one that we had been using for validation, quite simply because we figured that it would likely be quieter and less annoying than a better looking unit!
I switched over to the experimental Ubuntu image, and the fan doesn’t change speed. I guess it’s on full bore, because I can feel the breeze from it about 2 feet away! Still fairly quiet.