PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

Interesting that the group behind this is Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, which is sponsored by UC Berkeley as well as a major Chinese university and the Shenzhen government.<p>China is quite interested in RISC-V gaining traction as trade and security barriers rise and they work to build up their domestic technology sector.<p>Going into wild-ass speculation mode, if this board really is affordable, I wonder if it&#x27;s being subsidized by the Chinese gov&#x27;t to encourage RISC-V adoption.<p>If I understand correctly, it&#x27;s hard to make a cheap RISC-V Linux board with a price in the same order of magnitude as Raspberry Pi, because the Pi benefits from the availability of cheap, powerful ARM-based CPUs that were mass-produced for the mobile phone market. Linux-capable RISC-V parts have nowhere near these economies of scale.

Promising hardware, though this isn&#x27;t looking like comparable hardware even to the Raspberry Pi Zero. Only has a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) processor at 500+ MHz. RAM size not specified. If it was priced in the $5-15 range it would be more or less practical, but higher than that I&#x27;d be buying it solely for the architecture novelty.

Oof, GPU by Imagination Technologies.<p>Here&#x27;s hoping their close brush with death opened them to the idea of open sourcing their code.

I honestly didn&#x27;t realise the Raspberry Pi isn&#x27;t open source. Why isn&#x27;t it?<p>The Foundation&#x27;s charitable objective is education, so sure, it&#x27;s not <i>necessary</i>, but there really seems to be no reason for it to be closed - I suppose it&#x27;s just &#x27;closed by default&#x27;?

Apparently they plan to include a PowerVR GPU on the second generation boards.<p>That&#x27;s not very OSHW if you ask me. I&#x27;d rather an unaccelerated framebuffer, or even no graphics at all.<p>They don&#x27;t seem to understand what kind of market there is for this sort of device. If I didn&#x27;t care about this sort of thing, I would just grab one of the many proprietary-encumbered SBCs, any of which faster and cheaper than this board is going to be.

Unfortunately not purely based on Free and Open Source software:<p>&gt; Exceptons (sic): foundry related IPs and high-speed commercial interface, but gradually reduce close source (sic) usage over time<p>Wonder what the FSF will make of it. They&#x27;ve long lamented that Raspberry Pi depends on non-Free software.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fsf.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;hw&#x2F;single-board-computers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fsf.org&#x2F;resources&#x2F;hw&#x2F;single-board-computers</a>

See also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seeedstudio.com&#x2F;Sipeed-Maix-Cube-p-4553.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seeedstudio.com&#x2F;Sipeed-Maix-Cube-p-4553.html</a><p>This is RISC-V, with a neural co-processor (runs YOLO), camera, GPIOs, leds etc. For $25.<p>It runs MicroPython out of the box, but someone has Linux booting on the board equivalent.<p>I have one, and there are teething pains but the platform seems pretty capable.

&gt; Storage – TBD, likely MicroSD card<p>Meh. I wish they would realize that SD cards are not made to be a system disk. I need SATA or NVME ports and lots of them so I can build my own NAS!

What&#x27;s the latest on a cheap, small board where you can run linux, with BLE &amp; WiFi 2.4&#x2F;5GHz?<p>Rpi Zero W and the corresponding Banana Pi M2 Zero meet all criteria except the 5GHz. Beside these, I have a really hard time finding any cheap alternative.<p>There&#x27;s plenty of embedded devices for iot, from arduino to all others. But 100% of the iot I have in my apartment are actually powered and don&#x27;t need a batter&#x2F;extremely low consumption. I much rather enjoy the flexibility of running linux (or android) vs flashing a firmware.

&quot;even though the goal is to eventually have as much IP released under a BSD-like open source license&quot;<p>What do people mean _exactly_ by &#x27;IP&#x27; in contexts like this related to computing boards such as SBCs and FPGAs?<p>The only &#x27;IP&#x27; I know is a term pertaining to legal concepts like patents, where &#x27;IP&#x27; and &#x27;patent&#x27; are almost synonymous. In the current context, what does it mean to &#x27;release&#x27; this &#x27;IP&#x27;? How do you &#x27;release&#x27; a patent?

One of the comments I made to myself was that on the die shots, USB3 part is as big as a CPU core ! What would need so much silicon ? Isn&#x27;t USB3 hardware more or less a serial bus? Is it logic or memory or analog interface parts here? I am curious.

Why is RISC-V even so hyped up&#x2F;successful? Other open ISAs precede it, and AFAIK the code density that RISC-V allows is disappointing considering the designers had an opportunity to start from scratch.

If this is real ... sign me up! I have a couple of RISC-V Arduino clones, interesting but not that useful. I&#x27;ve ported software to RISC-V using the Fedora RISC-V port running under QEMU. It&#x27;ll be nice to finally get inexpensive Linux capable hardware in hand!<p>Of course, what would be <i>really</i> good would be a CHIP-Pro style module that is a complete Linux SBC suitable for inclusion in a IoT PCB design. Thus far, the CHIP-Pro (ARM-32) and Onion Omega2 (MIPS-32) have been the only viable reasonably priced embeddable Linux modules I&#x27;ve seen.

It looks like it has some details on &quot;slow&quot; i&#x2F;o like UART and I2C, but not sure if that counts things like analog PWM timers for certain pins, like there are on RPis. Does anyone have any more information on that? You can do it all in software on a UART, but I think that can be a little more tricky. Since so many basic embedded projects can be helped with that kind of functionality, it would be awesome if it was available.

I like the idea of going multi-core from the start. The Pi Zero W is massively under-powered when compared to its siblings, but IMHO suffers a lot more from being single-core than from any other constraint.<p>(Which is why I use the 3A+ for most of my stuff, really. Four cores and full-size HDMI and USB are very useful indeed.)

One of the key selling points for me is the RasPi OS and software ecosystem. Raspbian a great distro, very well aligned with the hardware. Getting a generic distro to boot on a system isn&#x27;t the same as ensuring a smooth experience with things like system config, video playback, networking and peripherals.

The chip industry will do like the telecom industry.<p>1st few players grow it important 2nd it becames a big monopoly, we all depend on 3rd other players need 10 years to build competition ( needed time to build cable&#x2F;towers) ( needed time to develop processors ) 4th you have a bunch of players, all with FIX COSTS and with a 1$ variable cost for new customers, the competition squeez the margins to arround Zero. 5th you still have to keep up with the improvements ( 5G?? &#x2F; 7nm??, 6nm?? ), so just to keep going investments are needed, and so profits disappear in the industry<p>airlines, Telecom, .... next chipmakers

I understand why the memory and USB controller is closed source, but why do the slow IOs such as I2C and SPI is also closed source?

Sweet. I&#x27;ll monitor this an order a non-gpu version when it comes out. Most of my stuff just needs a serial console.

Really, it’s the price and mass market availability more than anything else that makes the Raspberry Pi a Raspberry Pi, moreso than the exact featureset (especially considering the difference in capabilities between the original and v4). No word on that, it seems?

&gt;The board will target the Raspberry Pi price<p>That would be amazing. RISC V has thus far not struck me as something within reach of the average casual consumer.

&quot;The first board without GPU is planned for Q4 2020, following with one with PowerVR GPU in 2021.&quot;.<p>Ah, how quickly we forgot the GMA500&#x2F;Poulsobo chip.

Will the chips be available on their own? This is the biggest problem with Raspberry-PI- I can&#x27;t buy the CPU on Digikey.