
Omg it looks awesome! I love cute little powerful things like this, the jetson nano is AMAZING especially as it has mipi connectors for proper cams! :D
It seems computers without an Arm or x86 chip are in serious demand in the RISC-V community. A Raspberry Pi-like small-board computer with an RISC-V chip and GPU went up for preorder on Alibaba two days ago, but is now listed as being no longer available. Sipeed No longer available. Source: Sipeeed. Click to enlarge The …
Your thinking "royalty free processor". I would suggest that the market is more to people for whom "Western technology free" computers are more of an interest given we block technology transfers to countries we don't like.
It's easy to dismiss this now as being ten times the cost of a Pi but if it's a pre production sample for people to write software for then when a full production example starts getting turned out in quantity at a comparable (or cheaper) price then it might be premature to dismiss it.
Is it -
National pride?
“provably no hidden CIA plots”?
“the US can’t stop us having this”
“can be developed in any way we like”
None of these make a lot of sense to me, with 2&3 being factually incorrect, but I’m genuinely curious which one you mean.
It's not sub Pi 3. The C910 cores are roughly Pi 4 class -- claimed ARM A73 class vs A72 in the Pi 4.
The U54 cores in the 3.5 year old HiFive Unleashed were a little slower than Pi 3. The U74 cores in the HiFive Unmatched (and the now cancelled BeagleV "Starlight") are ARM A55 class, which is significantly better than the A53 in the Pi 3. Benchmarks bare this out -- other than ones that depend on SIMD or crypto instructions, obviously, as that's something coming in RISC-V next year.
The hardware looks really interesting. I hope they get over this "small run" hurdle. I see it on kickstarter a lot. The first run is often popular but by the second, everyone interested already has one so it flops and the company does something else profitable.
If they can somehow keep churning out the old unpopular kit, it might start to become sourcable enough for some big players to depend on it.
As a user myself (I don't really know too much of the hardware industry), I tend to wait for OpenBSD to support it and by then it is so difficult to track down the actual hardware. Yes, personally I can just buy in advance (and I often do) but this is not a good cycle for the larger companies who will put out the real money.
What really appeals in a platform are open drivers and APIs. I can't count the number of SBCs that are essentially e-waste because with newer Linux kernels gradually support for more hardware features vanish. Only a small fraction of hardware features like GPU support (including encoding/decoding) ever make it into mainline Linux.
Regardless of the ISA, if these boards are doing the same nonsense trick with driver blobs, they're just ever so more e-waste the moment the manufacturer drops active support. This is where x86 and similar platforms have a massive leg up on ARM in terms of openness.
I welcome this RISC-V board and future boards with much higher specs.
What would be ideal would be an ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, mini-ITX etc. style of motherboard with PCIe slots and upgradable memory. Standard CPU socket types that would allow for easy upgrades are not likely to happen. Even the x86-64 CPU sockets are not standard between Intel and AMD. Even a headless board similar to the, now dead, Applied Micro XC-1 (16 GB of RAM, 8-core 64-bit ARMv8 @ 1.6 GHz) would be fantastic.
It might "enable future porting work (e.g., ARM or RISC-V)" and spark some ferrocerium under the illumos project (fork created in 2010 just before Oracle discontinuation of the OpenSolaris project). (ref: https://github.com/illumos/ipd/tree/master/ipd/0019 ).
Yea but that is the catch 22, without the hardware not enough people can debug their software, and not enough software then people are not interested in buying the hardware. Luckily most open source operating systems are looking forward to porting a minimal amount of bootstrap code for the new architecture, and are champing at the bit to get their hands on the hardware.
Embedded World RISC-V International has grown its pile of royalty-free, open specifications, with additional documents covering firmware, hypervisors, and more.
RISC-V – pronounced "risk five", and not to be confused with the other architecture of that name, RISC-5 – essentially sets out how a CPU core should work from a software point of view. Chip designers can implement these instruction set specifications in silicon, and there are a good number of big industry players backing it.
The latest specs lay out four features that compatible processors should adhere to. Two of them, E-Trace and Zmmul, will be useful for organizations building RISC-V hardware and software, and the other two could prove important in future, aiding the development of OSes to run on RISC-V computers.
Analysis Here's something that would have seemed outlandish only a few years ago: to help fuel Intel's future growth, the x86 giant has vowed to do what it can to make the open-source RISC-V ISA worthy of widespread adoption.
In a presentation, an Intel representative shared some details of how the chipmaker plans to contribute to RISC-V as part of its bet that the instruction set architecture will fuel growth for its revitalized contract chip manufacturing business.
While Intel invested in RISC-V chip designer SiFive in 2018, the semiconductor titan's intentions with RISC-V evolved last year when it revealed that the contract manufacturing business key to its comeback, Intel Foundry Services, would be willing to make chips compatible with x86, Arm, and RISC-V ISAs. The chipmaker then announced in February it joined RISC-V International, the ISA's governing body, and launched a $1 billion innovation fund that will support chip designers, including those making RISC-V components.
Pic As Apple and Qualcomm push for more Arm adoption in the notebook space, we have come across a photo of what could become one of the world's first laptops to use the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture.
In an interview with The Register, Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, signaled we will see a RISC-V laptop revealed sometime this year as the ISA's governing body works to garner more financial and development support from large companies.
It turns out Philipp Tomsich, chair of RISC-V International's software committee, dangled a photo of what could likely be the laptop in question earlier this month in front of RISC-V Week attendees in Paris.
Opinion Interviews with chip company CEOs are invariably enlightening. On top of the usual market-related subjects of success and failure, revenues and competition, plans and pitfalls, the highly paid victim knows that there's a large audience of unusually competent critics eager for technical details. That's you.
Take The Register's latest interview with RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond. It moved smartly through the gears on Intel's recent Platinum Membership of the open ISA consortium ("they're not too worried about their x86 business"), the interest from autocratic regimes (roughly "there are no rules, if some come up we'll stick by them"), and what RISC-V's 2022 will look like. Laptops. Thousand-core AI chips. Google hyperscalers. Edge. The plan seems to be to do in five years what took Arm 20.
RISC-V may not be an existential risk to Intel, but Arm had better watch it.
Interview The CEO of RISC-V's governing body says she wants to nothing less than "world domination" for the rising open-source processor technology, but to do that, the nonprofit needs buy-in from a variety of organizations, even those steeped in dominant, proprietary architectures, such as x86 giant Intel.
In an interview this week with The Register, RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond reckons the buy-in, which comes in the form of paid memberships, is needed to support ongoing development of the royalty-free CPU instruction set architecture to better compete with x86 and Arm ISAs.
"We have to have a level of funding in order to operate and manage this special rodeo of ours," she says.
Version 12.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) was released this month, and among its many changes is support for China's LoongArch processor architecture.
The announcement of the release is here; the LoongArch port was accepted as recently as March.
China's Academy of Sciences developed a family of MIPS-compatible microprocessors in the early 2000s. In 2010 the tech was spun out into a company called Loongson Technology which today markets silicon under the brand "Godson". The company bills itself as working to develop technology that secures China and underpins its ability to innovate, a reflection of Beijing's belief that home-grown CPU architectures are critical to the nation's future.
China's military-derived and government-approved Linux distribution, Ubuntu Kylin, has revealed plans to target a second RISC-V platform.
Ubuntu Kylin is Ubuntu’s official version for China and was developed in partnership with Chinese authorities, including the military.
In March 2022, a version of the OS was released for the HiFive Unmatched board – a SiFive product in the Mini-ITX form factor and packing a five-core Freedom U740 SoC.
MIPS is back, but this time the company is bringing processors to market based on the RISC-V open instruction set architecture, rather than the MIPS architecture the chip designer is synonymous with.
The current incarnation* of MIPS proclaimed its entry to the RISC-V market with a preview of the first products in its new eVocore processor line, which initially comprises two multiprocessor IP cores, the eVocore P8700 and I8500.
MIPS said that the new processors are designed for high-performance, real-time compute applications such as networking, datacenter, and the automotive industry.
Alibaba Cloud has advanced its work to port Android to the RISC-V architecture.
The Chinese cloud giant has spent more than a year working on a port of the Google-spawned OS and in January 2021 showed off a GUI powered by Android 10 running on silicon designed by T-Head Semiconductor – an Alibaba subsidiary that designs its own RISC-V chip.
Alibaba Cloud has now revealed it's working on Android 12, and has integrated third-party vendor modules. The result is Android on RISC-V that's capable of playing audio and video, running Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, and driving cameras.
India's government has announced a plan and roadmap for local semiconductor design and production, based on the open source RISC-V architecture, and set a goal of delivering world-class silicon by the end of next year.
The Digital India RISC-V Microprocessor Program (DIR-V) will see Indian industry and academia team to develop Systems on Chips (SoC) for servers, mobile devices, automotive applications, IoT devices, and microcontrollers.
Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a former Intel chip designer who now serves as India’s minister of state for entrepreneurship, skill development, electronics & technology, said DIR-V aims to "achieve industry-grade silicon and design wins by December 2023."
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