BeagleV-Ahead RISC-V board

Okay, so is there actual documentation for the SoC used on this critter? I mean a full Databook &#x2F; Technical Reference Manual, not maybe 30 pages of overview, maybe a list of register base addresses (if you&#x27;re lucky), and a pile of Linux kernel patches (upstream if you&#x27;re lucky, but still of less value to someone wanting to actually write code for &#x2F; port something to the SoC) or an &quot;SDK&quot; containing a bunch of low quality vendor code for the peripherals.<p>I&#x27;d love to see a RISC-V SoC (not just a dinky little MCU) that has real &#x2F; complete documentation. So far I have yet to find any for any of the various RISC-V based SBCs that have shipped.

I&#x27;ve been very disappointed with the rollout of their most recent board, Beagleplay. There are all of these self-congratulatory videos of Jason Kridner at trade shows talking about they&#x27;re making Embedded Linux more accessible&#x2F;simple. Yet 4 months after release, the quickstart guides are mostly notes to future quickstart guide editors, or otherwise describe workflows that don&#x27;t actually work.

I have a few Beaglebone Blacks kicking around the house and they&#x27;re great. I&#x27;ve always felt the Beagle boards were superior to Raspberry Pis, and that the RPi mostly succeeded because of better marketing and outreach efforts.<p>It&#x27;s nice to see the project still chugging along

I&#x27;m always looking out for a nice single board computer (SBC), but my phase when I looked at all those (on paper) nice sounding SBCs through rose-tinted glasses is long gone, the only question I want to have answered when checking one out now is:<p>Does it have Linux kernel support in the mainline? I.e., not some weird semi-proprietary patch blob on some GitHub account basing of the 3.18 kernel or so..<p>If it doesn&#x27;t, I can close the tab immediately and know for sure that I won&#x27;t miss out. If it posted patches to the LKML, maybe even in an advanced revision integrating review comments then it might be worth looking at it later.

Overall nice looking board.<p>I used to scoff at PowerVR GPUs as being unsupportable &amp; worthless, but progress has been quite good lately. Only 3 SoC supported &amp; not this but porting should go relatively smoothly now.<p>Price feels high.<p>Elephant in the room: what the heck is that USB micro 3.0 connector doing there? Yikes! What an ugly relic. And that&#x27;s the only USB on the board.

Yet another TH1520 board.<p>Note there&#x27;s several, by different vendors, with different connectivity (e.g. PCIe, M2, wifi&#x2F;bt) and RAM (4-16GB range).<p>The CPU is a XuanTie C910, which is somewhat faster than SiFive U74 used in the JH7110 (VisionFive2), and adds pre-spec vector extension (0.7.1).<p>I would still recommend VisionFive2 or Star64 to most people, due to its maturity and much better upstream support[0].<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rvspace.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;project&#x2F;JH7110_Upstream_Plan" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rvspace.org&#x2F;en&#x2F;project&#x2F;JH7110_Upstream_Plan</a>

$150-$180 seems expensive for 4gb ram and 16gb flash when you can get an sbc with the same soc, the sipeed licheepi 4a with 16gb of ram and 128gb flash for $180, or $120 for 8gb ram and 8gb flash, or $135 for 8gb ram and 32gb flash

&quot;2GHz quad-core RISC-V 64GCV Xuantie C910 central processing unit (CPU)&quot;<p>The datasheet doesn&#x27;t mention Vector (V) extension support. Is this an error on the Beagleboard page?

For a lot of applications this is really not competitive. You can get an Intel&#x2F;AMD mini PC on Amazon for a little over $100 these days, running fully supported Linux.

Here is Beagle board list:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arrow.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;research-and-events&#x2F;videos&#x2F;comparing-beaglebone-boards" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.arrow.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;research-and-events&#x2F;videos&#x2F;comparin...</a><p>At the moment I have no plan to acquire yet another beagleboard, i.e. this BeagleV, a bit pricey for potential projects at scale, and I don&#x27;t need those media related ports, though the AI NPU seems nice for edge AI.

Is this a 100% totally transparent open source sbc?

64bits RISC-V: yes yes yes.<p>H.265&#x2F;H.264: Where is AV1? Coze risc-v is worldwide royalty free, not h.265&#x2F;h264.<p>HDMI: same issue than H.265&#x2F;H.264, I should see a dedicated display usb-c connector (displayport).<p>But I am being excessive, it is going in the right direction, the next step is to remove H.265&#x2F;H.264 and HDMI royalties.<p>That said, has the GPU a lean, plain and simple C written, vulkan3D open source driver?

No USB-C port.<p>No NVME port.<p>Price tag is too high.<p>Shame because the rest of the H&#x2F;W looks nice.

Ah Beagleboard, what everyone was reaching for, before Arduino and Raspberry Pi got famous.

What&#x27;s up with their pricing? It&#x27;s way too expensive compared to the competition

I look at all the chip features like video encoding and video decoding and I think &quot;that is super cool, pity the software will never fully enable the potential of the hardware&quot;.<p>Then I return to the ordinary Intel world where stuff works.

&gt; <i>System on chip: Alibaba T-Head TH1520</i><p>Why is this not a TI SoC?

Surely this:<p><i>50GFLOPS, 3Mpixel&#x2F;s Imagination BXM-4-64 graphics processing unit (GPU)</i><p>Has got to be a typo? 3 million pixels per second is not very impressive, to understate things a bit.<p>Edit: also, in Sweden Digi-Key want almost $180 for this which was more than I expected. Wow.

Nitpicking but they really need to have someone proofread their copy.

I like very much the BBB, but here the price point is way too excessive. Around 135€. It is the price range of a NUC.

Wow $235 CAD. Why is this board so insanely expensive?

Any benchmarks of the CPU?