As much as I enjoyed working with the PolarFire team when I worked at SiFive, I have to mention their tools really do suck. The first time I used the Libero tools, it took a week of back and forth w/ support to resolve a license issue. The license activation string that came in the package was just plain wrong and I had to prove to the support people that someone at our firm had actually paid for the board we were using.
Aside from that, the tools were klunky, even compared to Xilinx/AMD Vivado. And as best as I can remember, the free license expired after a year. After that you have to pay money for crappy tools.
While I love the BeagleBone guys, unless you have a budget to purchase tools from MicroChip that you don't get to learn how much the cost of the tool is until a year later, you may want to consider using a FPGA supported by various open source tools (which are, themselves kind of klunky, but at least you're not paying an arm and a leg.)
Yosys + Symbiflow/F4PGA work with the Xilinx/AMD Artix-7 board and iCE40. You may want to pick one of those up if your work-load is FPGA heavy.
Most of the IO comes out of the FPGA fabric. This seems both very interesting but also kind of annoying.
In a past life looking at these Polarfire chips, one downside of this kind of configuration of IO was that the bus between the FPGA fabric and the RISC-V cores was not all that fast, at least in comparison to what the FPGA fabric itself could push for IO to external devices. Not that this is likely to matter for people buying the BeagleV-Fire, but just don't let the interface speeds fool you into thinking the RISC-V cores can actually access all that IO performance without bottlenecks. Or maybe they've changed how this works since I last looked at these chips?
The SERDESs seem powerful. Maybe some of them are facing or can face the RISC-V cores.
My main nag with Polarfire is lack of documentation enabling support on the open stack (yosys+nextpnr).
Ironically, we might end up with documentation and support obtained from reverse engineering the official tools and their databases and output.
Such support is ironically very favorable to vendors that do not deserve it, e.g. iCE40 and Project iCEStorm, the first FPGA hardware supported, definitely popularized that specific FPGA architecture, which helped Lattice's sales.
Aside from that, the tools were klunky, even compared to Xilinx/AMD Vivado. And as best as I can remember, the free license expired after a year. After that you have to pay money for crappy tools.
While I love the BeagleBone guys, unless you have a budget to purchase tools from MicroChip that you don't get to learn how much the cost of the tool is until a year later, you may want to consider using a FPGA supported by various open source tools (which are, themselves kind of klunky, but at least you're not paying an arm and a leg.)
Yosys + Symbiflow/F4PGA work with the Xilinx/AMD Artix-7 board and iCE40. You may want to pick one of those up if your work-load is FPGA heavy.