BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

Is there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA&#x2F;M.2 port to board like this?<p>The RaspberryPi is also &quot;disk-less&quot;, which to me is one of the major limitations.<p>It&#x27;s a super interesting little board, and I love that it&#x27;s a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don&#x27;t know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card slot).

I&#x27;ve been unable to use Beagle boards in the past as they ship with an old kernel and uboot without the sources to update or config them (this was specifically with the black variant). It probably had something to do with vendor NDAs with chipsets or something but it made them entirely unusable to me and more expensive than competitors by almost 2x to boot.<p>I would love a RISC-V board to play with that is a bit more stable and about the size of a Raspberry Pi within a reasonable price range. The SiFive development boards are pretty pricey, definitely showcase hardware (look at all these peripherals or this is basically a desktop computer!).<p>I&#x27;m hoping with the explicit call out of open hardware and open software that this board won&#x27;t have the same issues as the Beaglebone Black...

Arstechnica coverage: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;seeed-and-beagleboard-team-up-to-provide-a-new-risc-v-based-linux-pc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;seeed-and-beagleboar...</a>

Does anyone have informed opinion about the usability &#x2F; value &#x2F; relevance &#x2F; quality of the Neural network support on this chip ?<p>Their page mentions spec with :<p><pre><code> • SiFive U74 RISC-V Dual core with 2MB L2 cache @ 1.5GHz • Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision • NVDLA Engine (configuration 2048 MACs@800MHz ) • Neural Network Engine (1024MACs@500MHz) </code></pre> So this board seems to have some great support for neural net &#x2F; robotics processing ?<p>I have just noticed the recent trend of neural hardware support on mainstream chips... Apples M1, this chip.<p>Wondering what the implications are for software and user-space .. what kind of devices &#x2F; apps will this enable ?<p>One area Im interested in is turning lidar scanner point data into 3D geometry on the device, thus solving a big data management issue.

What kind of performance is expected from this compared to say the RPi 4B? Any noteworthy changes in performance characteristics (e.g better&#x2F;worse I&#x2F;O or something)?

&gt; All GPIOs can be configured to different functions including but not limited to SDIO, Audio, SPI, I2C, UART and PWM<p>Does supporting audio mean that these GPIOs can be used as analog-to-digital converters? There are home automation applications where reading a voltage in an ethernet connected device is a good fit but from what I&#x27;ve seen in a raspberry that requires extra hardware connected to the IO ports.

Is the SiFive U74 open source?<p>I know the RISC-V ISA is, but I thought the SiFive designs were proprietary.

Does it have an GPU? I can&#x27;t quite decipher the specs.<p>Random googling suggests that SiFive have partnered with PowerVR for GPU, which might even enable vulkan support, but I suppose this SoC is not one of those?

Can someone explain the technical benefits of this architecture over the competition? That is should I be excited if I <i>don&#x27;t</i> care about e.g. openness? Or is it simply an effort to create something that is a half-decent cpu alternative but open?<p>Is there anything about RISC-V that is &quot;better&quot; simply because it is a later design than others? Is it likely to evolve faster because it is open or more modern?

Interesting, I might get myself one of these to play with.<p>But the board has an HDMI output, however the description doesn&#x27;t describe the specifications on display processor &#x2F; GPU functionality, or even if it&#x27;s just a simple framebuffer, etc. There&#x27;s specifications on Video processing, but I get the impression this is for camera &#x2F; video input, not output.

Can&#x27;t find any cost information

What does affordable mean in that context? There is no price on the website.<p>edit: CNX Software has some more info [0] - it&#x27;s $119, still a far cry from a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnx-software.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;13&#x2F;beaglev-powerful-open-hardware-risc-v-linux-sbc-targets-ai-applications&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnx-software.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;13&#x2F;beaglev-powerful-ope...</a>

The website is super slow. It downloads 7.66MB of files, and it took 1.05min to load for me on a 2020 MBP with 150Mbps bandwidth and ~15ms latency.

This looks really awesome. It&#x27;s been a longstanding desire of mine to build a custom laptop with one of these powerful small SOCs (originally thought of something like the lattepanda, which is similar to an Intel macbook air, but as a slightly bigger tan pi soc).<p>Would be super awesome to do it with riscv

If the form factor is reduced to something like an NSLU2 you can attach a large spinning disk and have a desktop server&#x2F;NAS device. i.e., an unlocked WD MY Cloud with open source community android and iphone app for the device

Why the linux boards are always designed to be cheap? What about those who have little more dough and are willing to put some cash to get extra? Just create some expensiver premium models, not only cheap stuff, damn it.

Where are these manufactured?

The type of questions in the application questionnaire (&quot;Click to Apply&quot;) is encouraging -- it makes me think they anticipate some real professional interest in this.

Most RISC-V processors use really old node sizes. Even Raspberry Pi is on 28nm.<p>To be more efficient and complete with mainstream processors a move to 10&#x2F;12nm is required.

Awesome project! But please compress your images, it took me 2 minutes to load your website.<p>Convert everything to &lt;300kb progressive jpg and use svg for graphics.

Is there a list of RISC-V CPUs in production someplace?

Is video hardware also open source like RISC V CPU?

I do not really use such devices.<p>Can someone let me know, is there other use cases of such devices than prototyping&#x2F;hobby?

Does anybody know if there is SBC with a large RISC-V cpu (8, 16 or more cores)?

What’s the relationship between this project and BeagleBoard.org?

What features makes it “designed for Linux”?

Where&#x27;s the source code?

I&#x27;m missing OpenGL!

&quot;Open source&quot; with nvidia hardware? Good luck with that

Which will be generally available first: the BeagleV or the Raspberry Pi 5?

How is RISC-V better than x64? Aren&#x27;t both of them just ISAs? The only pro I can find is that RISC V is cleaner (less legacy). But no one programs in assembly these days so why is this an issue?