Enthusiasts dash for RISC-V computer with GPU 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.
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