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BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
- farseer 6y agoCan't find any cost information
- bahorn 6y agoThe google form lists the prices in an image: * $119 for 4GB of RAM * $149 for 8GB of RAM But the early version apparently is only the 8GB variant.
- michielr 6y agoI just got an email from Seeed Studio > BeagleV™ is the first affordable RISC-V board designed to run Linux. Based on the RISC-V architecture, BeagleV™ pushes open-source to the next level and gives developers more freedom and power to innovate and design industry-leading solutions with an affordable introductory price at $149.
- pantalaimon 6y agoWhat does affordable mean in that context? There is no price on the website. edit: CNX Software has some more info [0] - it's $119, still a far cry from a Raspberry Pi or Orange Pi [0] https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/01/13/beaglev-powerful-open-hardware-risc-v-linux-sbc-targets-ai-applications/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/01/13/beaglev-powerful-ope...
- messe 6y ago$149 for 8GB of RAM on a RISC-V board is very affordable compared to the previous options.
- StreamBright 6y agoFor that price you can get a decent SOC with ARM64 too.
- pjc50 6y agoYou pay more to have something Free. Software people have yet to realise this reality of the hardware market.
- patrec 6y agoThat's not the point. Risc-V machines are not yet price competitive, but presumably will be at some point. This is for people who are interested enough in Risc-V to spend some time and a ~$100 on it, but not thousands of of dollars. And the main reason many people are interested in Risc-V over Arm is that it's open and license free.
- brucehoult 6y agoRaspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB RAM is $75, and that's not counting a power supply, SD card, or HDMI cable. Adding those at pishop.us (16 GB card) takes the price to $95.85. We don't know whether the BeagleV price includes those necessary items or not but either way coming within a factor of 2 of Raspberry Pi price is pretty impressive at this stage. Up until now you've paid $3000 for a 1.5 GHz RISC-V setup with HDMI and USB etc, if you've got one actually in your hands (HiFive Unleashed plus MicroSemi HiFive Expansion board), or $665 for one that will start delivery in March (HiFive Unmatched). There is also the $499 Icicle which is quad core but only single-issue (like the HiFive Unleashed) and only 600 MHz. Prices are plummeting.
- fctorial 6y agoWhere's the source code?
- rwmj 6y agoI don't think it's open source. RISC-V is an open ISA, but implementations are not required to be open source (although there are many implementations which are).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Pet_Ant 6y agoI like to think of it as an open-standard like where anyone can download the TCK versus something where you need to pay for the SPECs from ISO (for example Prolog is https://www.iso.org/standard/21413.html https://www.iso.org/standard/21413.html which is 185€/$250 USD).
- coder543 6y agoThe marketing page indicates that the product isn't finished yet. Presumably, they will release schematics and such when the device enters manufacturing, if they follow through on actually being Open Hardware. As others mention, the processor core designs probably won't be open.
- my123 6y agoSiFive CPUs are just as closed as Arm ones, you just pay a royalty to SiFive instead of Arm. Only the ISA itself is open, (fast) implementations are not. (for any commercial-grade one instead of academic projects)
- karakanb 6y agoThe 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.
- zwirbl 6y agoFrom the Guidelines: Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful. Still, the page loads in ~3secs on my 2012 i7-3770K with 100Mbps...
- qalmakka 6y agoThere's something wrong at your end, 1 minute to download 7.66 MBs is abysmally slow for a > 100 Mbps connection.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- brucehoult 6y agoI didn't measure the size, but it loaded in 4 seconds here in Chrome on Ubuntu, via VDSL.
- pizzazzaro 6y agoNoscript + ublock origin fixed that for me.
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoInteresting, I might get myself one of these to play with. But the board has an HDMI output, however the description doesn't describe the specifications on display processor / GPU functionality, or even if it's just a simple framebuffer, etc. There's specifications on Video processing, but I get the impression this is for camera / video input, not output.
- Narishma 6y agoAccording to [0] the first revision will just have a framebuffer, later ones an unspecified Imagination GPU. 0 - https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/01/13/beaglev-powerful-open-hardware-risc-v-linux-sbc-targets-ai-applications/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/01/13/beaglev-powerful-ope...
- stragies 6y agoThat means PowerVR, most likely. Bad news, no useable drivers ever existed for mainline linux kernel for any PowerVR CPU
- pabs3 6y agoImgTec are planning on writing and upstreaming open drivers for Linux and mesa for another RISC-V based board, so probably those drivers will work here too. https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picorio-the-raspberry-pi-like-small-board-computer-for-risc-v/ https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picorio-the-raspberry-pi-like...
- filleokus 6y agoWhat kind of performance is expected from this compared to say the RPi 4B? Any noteworthy changes in performance characteristics (e.g better/worse I/O or something)?
- rwmj 6y agoHighly unlikely to be very competitive. At this stage it's about getting RISC-V hardware into developers' hands, and previous boards either cost $1000 or were limited in ways where they could not run Linux well. (I am one of the Fedora/RISC-V maintainers.)
- deepGem 6y agoJust saw this SiFive board HiFive is retailing for $679, can you please comment if this is any good for toying around ? Specs look more than decent - almost desktop class computing. https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched
- rwmj 6y agoI have a couple on order, and I've talked to one of the developers. It looks nice - PCIe, NVRAM SSDs, mini ITX format, 16GB RAM, more cores, etc - but not in the same price point or market segment as an SBC. We will likely buy a pile of them to do Fedora builds.
- giantrobot 6y agoWhy would you want use these as build machines? It seems more efficient to just cross-compile on your fastest build machines. You get much faster CI feedback that way. Obviously you want to validate RISC-V code on native devices but using them as builders seems wasteful. I'm genuinely curious why that's desirable. Maybe I just misunderstand your comment and you want the RISC-V boards for validation i.e. make sure you can self-host the distro even if in general releases are cross-compiled on your (I assume AMD64) build fleet.
- WatchDog 6y agoIs the SiFive U74 open source? I know the RISC-V ISA is, but I thought the SiFive designs were proprietary.
- stragies 6y agoThe processor maybe, but what about the e.g. USB3 controller, WIFI, etc, that can also freely snoop around your memory. Are there even open USB3 implementations?
- joana035 6y ago> that can also freely snoop around your memory. Can them? Even with IOMMU? EDIT: I don't think so.
- chem83 6y agoIs there an IOMMU specification standardized on RISC-V yet? I think it's just some early proposals. Or proprietary designs that achieve similar functionality such as Hex Five and WorldGuard. Am I right?
- gjsman-1000 6y agoOpen source refers solely to the software side of things in these groups and types of projects. Thus, all of the drivers and software you need to use the SiFive is open source and thus you can say it is an open source design. However, it is not an "open hardware" design in that the IP used to design the chip is not released.
- coder543 6y ago> However, it is not an "open hardware" design in that the IP used to design the chip is not released. The marketing page for the BeagleV specifically says "Open Hardware Design", but I agree that they probably didn't mean Open Hardware beyond just the PCB layout or something similar. It would be very surprising if they released the detailed schematics for the SiFive cores. Until there's some kind of common micro-fab standard where every major university can have a legit semiconductor fab for small scale operations, giving people the design doesn't really do much. I really wish that someone would work on the problem of making affordable, small-scale semiconductor fabrication possible on a reasonably modern node (<= 32nm). It's a hard problem... but everyone in the world being dependent on a few large fabs is also a hard problem.
- basher 6y agoArstechnica coverage: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/seeed-and-beagleboard-team-up-to-provide-a-new-risc-v-based-linux-pc/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/seeed-and-beagleboar...
- sradman 6y ago> Although the first hardware run will be entirely $140 / 8GiB systems, lower-cost variants with less RAM are expected in following releases. > The initial pilot run of BeagleV will use the Vision DSP hardware as a graphics processor, allowing a full graphical desktop environment under Fedora. Following hardware runs will include an unspecified model of Imagine GPU as well. Sounds like a direct competitor to the Raspberry Pi. I don't know if the Imagine GPU planned for the next iteration is playing catch-up or leapfrog. The Arstechnica article links to SiFive creates global network of RISC-V startups [1] which I think demonstrates that SiFive is strategically leveraging or responding to the geopolitics surrounding Chinese technology. [1] https://www.eenewsanalog.com/news/sifive-creates-global-network-risc-v-startups/page/0/1 https://www.eenewsanalog.com/news/sifive-creates-global-netw...
- wiremine 6y ago> Sounds like a direct competitor to the Raspberry Pi. I would consider the Black and Green to be competitors too. https://beagleboard.org/ https://beagleboard.org/ Would be really interested to get a good analysis of the Raspberry Pi, BB Black, and this new board.
- lsllc 6y agoRegarding the BBB/BBG, in the last 3-5 years the RPis have gotten significantly faster (RPi3 & 4) and gone 64-bit whereas the BBB & BBG haven't changed much (aside from a bit more eMMC and a very minor CPU bump) since they were launched. These days the 1GHZ 32-bit AM3358 (BBB RevC) is comparatively much slower and with only 512MB RAM, that's a lot less than a stock RPi 4. Having said that, the BBBs are a great device! They're rock solid and have far better I/O options than the RPi: 4 UARTS, multiple I2C, SPI & CAN buses, EHRPWM, a ton of GPIO, 2x PRU processors, LCD driver, both USB and USB Gadget, oh and of course, the onboard eMMC is great compared to booting from an SD. So I'm psyched about the Beagle-V.
- chiffre01 6y agoIs there a list of RISC-V CPUs in production someplace?
- coder543 6y agoI'm not sure if this is comprehensive, but it lists a good number of companies implementing RISC-V. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Implementations
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- akmittal 6y agoMost RISC-V processors use really old node sizes. Even Raspberry Pi is on 28nm. To be more efficient and complete with mainstream processors a move to 10/12nm is required.
- rwmj 6y agoI think everyone is well aware of that, but unless you're making and able to sell millions of boards and have hundreds of millions in cash flow, there's no real path to using 10nm or smaller nodes. FWIW AllWinner are currently manufacturing 5 million RISC-V chips (with TSMC IIRC). I don't know what node they are using.
- tyingq 6y agoAllWinner's XuanTie 906 RISCV chip is supposedly 22nm. https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/11/09/xuantie-c906-based-allwinner-risc-v-processor-to-power-12-linux-sbcs/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/11/09/xuantie-c906-based-a...
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoWith a claimed price of $12USD, too.
- akmittal 6y agoRaspberry Pi is sold in millions but still on 28nm
- CameronNemo 6y agoI guess if you can spring for smaller node sizes, you can spring for ARM licensing too.
- scoopr 6y agoDoes it have an GPU? I can't quite decipher the specs. 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?
- archanox 6y agoAs per the Ars link; > The initial pilot run of BeagleV will use the Vision DSP hardware as a graphics processor, allowing a full graphical desktop environment under Fedora. Following hardware runs will include an unspecified model of Imagine GPU as well.
- pabs3 6y agoAlso, ImgTec are planning on writing and upstreaming open drivers for Linux and mesa for another RISC-V based board, so probably those drivers will work here too. https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picorio-the-raspberry-pi-like-small-board-computer-for-risc-v/ https://riscv.org/blog/2020/11/picorio-the-raspberry-pi-like...
- Narishma 6y agoAnybody know what changed their mind? As I recall, they've always been pretty hostile to open source.
- CameronNemo 6y agoMaybe the realization that they are not NVIDIA.
- brucehoult 6y agoApple dropping them?
- monocasa 6y agoI don't think that necessarily says that ImgTec will be upstreaming the open drivers, more that they don't have a better option at the moment and will be replacing closed source components with each revision. I hope they will, but I'll believe it when I see it. They've been extremely allergic to open source in the past.
- mikece 6y agoWhich will be generally available first: the BeagleV or the Raspberry Pi 5?
- alkonaut 6y agoCan someone explain the technical benefits of this architecture over the competition? That is should I be excited if I don't care about e.g. openness? Or is it simply an effort to create something that is a half-decent cpu alternative but open? Is there anything about RISC-V that is "better" simply because it is a later design than others? Is it likely to evolve faster because it is open or more modern?
- tyingq 6y agoI think in the real world "No percentage of each sale payments to ARM" is what will drive RISC-V. An "open" ISA doesn't force anything else to be open. So, use cases like Western Digital, where they can quit paying ARM a percentage of every hard drive they sell, for example. As for technical advantages, each RISCV vendor has their own choice of how to implement, so it's hard to say anything broad that applies to all RISCV implementations. The Berkeley BOOM project is hitting really good DMIPS/MHz numbers. LowRISC has some interesting memory tagging and "minion core" ideas, etc. Edit: I left out perhaps the most important reason RISCV has a lot of hype. They've been successful getting first class support from the Linux kernel maintainers.
- pjc50 6y ago> quit paying ARM a percentage The percentage is very small, though. So this argument only works for very high volume use cases, which is why the RISC-V eval boards are currently far more expensive than comparable ARMs. Do WD do their own silicon yet, or do they just buy the parts?
- Narishma 6y agoThey design them. I don't know if they make them or not.
- reportingsjr 6y agoHow many ARM microcontrollers are low volume? Pretty much all of the examples I can think of are incredibly high volume. STM32, SAMD21/51, i.MX, etc. WD said they were finishing taping out their first production design about a year and a half ago, so I assume they have started shipping them at this point, but it's hard to find info.
- fctorial 6y agoHow is RISC-V better than x64? Aren'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?
- rwmj 6y agoIt's more about the licensing of the ISA. Try creating your own compatible x86 processors, and find out how long it takes before Intel's attack lawyers come down on you. ARM is a bit better but you still have to pay licensing fees. For people who want to git clone a design and manufacture it without involving lawyers or licensing fees, RISC-V is likely the best choice.
- Pet_Ant 6y agoThink of it as MP3 vs Ogg Vorbis. It's equivalent, slightly newer and a bit nicer, but really the benefit is that it's patent-unencumbered and you are free to tinker with the ISA and build your own versions at will.
- loudmax 6y agoNot many people program in assembly, but teams working on compilers like gcc and LLVM very much do care about the ISA. Apple has been able to make great progress moving from Intel x86 to their own custom ARM M1 processor. The way I understand it, RISC-V may allow similar advances.
- arnaudsm 6y agoAwesome project! But please compress your images, it took me 2 minutes to load your website. Convert everything to <300kb progressive jpg and use svg for graphics.
- jdkticom 6y agoOK.
- jdkticom 6y agohttps://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fbeaglev.org%2F https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... score still isn't great, but at least the images aren't the bottleneck anymore. The site is in the process of a grand rebuild that should get rid of the recurring jquery loads, but that's a few months away.
- mrweasel 6y agoIs there something inherently complicated in adding a SATA/M.2 port to board like this? The RaspberryPi is also "disk-less", which to me is one of the major limitations. It's a super interesting little board, and I love that it's a RISC-V, that could really help getting the CPU in the hands of people. I just don't know enough about these things to understand why there are no storage connectors (other than an SD card slot).
- happimess 6y agoI'm certainly no expert, but I've never been able to run a spinning disk HDD off of a raspberry pi without a powered USB hub. I imagine the thermals and form factor would be hurt pretty badly by including a plausible power supply.
- mrweasel 6y agoIt wouldn't need to be a spinning disk, I'm think SSD or NVME
- mbreese 6y agoI still need to run an SSD off of a powered hub for an RPi to use it stably.
- hackmiester 6y agoStrange. What Pi? I’ve had a spinning 2.5” HDD connected to a Pi 3B+ for a few years now.
- znpy 6y agomaybe you're running a 4200rpm disk and the other person is running a 7200rpm disk. faster-spinning-plates would draw more power, I guess.
- mbreese 6y agoRPI 4 -- the original revision. Whenever I ran it off the "official" power supply, I got disk errors. As soon as I moved over to a powered USB hub, I had no other issues. This was also with a keyboard and mouse plugged in, so maybe that had something to do with it. I was also trying to run it as a NAS, so it had a decent amount of IO. Maybe it could have been fixed with a better power supply, but switching over to the powered hub was easier to figure out.
- miohtama 6y agoIs video hardware also open source like RISC V CPU?
- ashleysmithgpu 6y ago"Open source" with nvidia hardware? Good luck with that
- pedrocr 6y ago> All GPIOs can be configured to different functions including but not limited to SDIO, Audio, SPI, I2C, UART and PWM 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've seen in a raspberry that requires extra hardware connected to the IO ports.
- monocasa 6y agoIt probably means I2S.
- pedrocr 6y agoMakes sense. Just another digital bus. Bummer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2S https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C2%B2S
- monocasa 6y agoEh, a decent audio DAC pretty much requires another chip since it takes up a ton of die space, so you'd be an absolute fool to use the same process node as your logic. Since this looks to be beagleboard compatible, you should be able to use an audio cape like this https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-67906/l/beaglebone-audio-cape https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-67906/l/beagleb... If you don't care about it being decent, you can just use the PWM channels like the RPi does.
- pedrocr 6y agoI don't really want audio. What I'm looking for is to read 3.3V or 5V analog levels, with really low frequency, once a second or less would be fine.
- monocasa 6y agoIn that case you can probably hook up the GPIOs to a resistor ladder if you know the shape of the analog signal you're trying to sample.
- TrueDuality 6y agoI'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. 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!). I'm hoping with the explicit call out of open hardware and open software that this board won't have the same issues as the Beaglebone Black...
- bradfa 6y agoI've never had this problem with Beagle Boards and sources. Sure the kernel or u-boot that ship with them might be slightly older but sources have always been available. And TI are quite decent at contributing to the upstream kernel and u-boot trees. Generally only a few months after a new TI SoC is announced there's enough support in the upstream u-boot and kernel to boot the board and do some useful things. Generally by the time silicon is buyable by mere mortals mainline is in pretty decent shape.
- Teknoman117 6y agoThe ubuntu on bbb team keeps up to date with the latest LTS kernels. There is 5.4 support and 5.10 support is in progress. The price wasn't so bad if you're in for the feature set (mainly the IO features). Using the embedded PRU controllers can replace the arduinos ones typically connects to their RPi. However, BBB is very old now. A single core cortex-A8 is abysmally slow. Getting the GPU working was always a pain. But I always used them headless so it wasn't an issue for me.
- CameronNemo 6y agoThe rk3328 board I have has been great. Quad Cortex A53, up to 4 GB of RAM, Mali GPU.
- lsllc 6y ago
- throwmemoney 6y agoIf the form factor is reduced to something like an NSLU2 you can attach a large spinning disk and have a desktop server/NAS device. i.e., an unlocked WD MY Cloud with open source community android and iphone app for the device
- ARandomerDude 6y agoThe type of questions in the application questionnaire ("Click to Apply") is encouraging -- it makes me think they anticipate some real professional interest in this.
- spurdoman77 6y agoWhy 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.
- Teknoman117 6y agoA few suggestions there: - hardkernel boards - Nvidia Jetson AGX Xavier (8 core + 512 CUDA core volta GPU, PCIe 4.0) - Honeycomb LX2 (16 core, quad SFP+ (for 10G optics), PCIe 4.0) I purchased an AGX Xavier for doing some self driving robot projects.
- yiyus 6y agoBecause, obviously, everyone wants to be the RISC raspberry. Becoming the expensive-alternative-to-raspberry-nobody-knows-about is not so attractive. Moreover, it looks to me like these cheap boards are not lacking features. What would you want in a premium version that is not present in the current models?
- ansible 6y agoHiFive Unmatched has up to 16GB of RAM: https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched But it is a little pricey.
- jandrese 6y agoBecause the expensive stuff doesn't sell. At the end of the day most of these are just toys and it's hard to justify spending $850 on a device that is less capable than a $500 mini form factor OEM box if you're doing something serious.
- HoverSausage 6y agoWhere are these manufactured?
- bulibuta 6y agoChina, of course :(
- joshlk 6y agoWhat features makes it “designed for Linux”?
- vhodges 6y agoMost risc-v cores to date have been more on the micro-controller side of things (ie without an MMU). The cpu on this board has one so it can run Linux.
- nickwanninger 6y agoLikely that it supports the Supervisor execution environment from the riscv spec [1]. This means it can run the typical ring 0 and ring 3 for kernelspace and userspace respectively, and importantly the board supports virtual memory. [1] https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/riscv-privileged-v1.10.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/riscv-privilege...
- wheybags 6y agoThis looks really awesome. It'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). Would be super awesome to do it with riscv
- jstgord 6y agoDoes anyone have informed opinion about the usability / value / relevance / quality of the Neural network support on this chip ? Their page mentions spec with : • 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) So this board seems to have some great support for neural net / robotics processing ? I have just noticed the recent trend of neural hardware support on mainstream chips... Apples M1, this chip. Wondering what the implications are for software and user-space .. what kind of devices / apps will this enable ? One area Im interested in is turning lidar scanner point data into 3D geometry on the device, thus solving a big data management issue.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoI suspect an NVIDIA Jetson would be a better choice for this kind of application.
- panny 6y agoIf it has driver/firmware blobs, I'll say no thanks and stick to my ARM Rockchips. If they deliver this on linux with full source code, I will definitely buy their boards.
- CameronNemo 6y agoNew Rockchip boards are coming with neural processing units.
- bullen 6y agoI'm missing OpenGL!
- bullen 6y agoMy bad: https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/01/13/beaglev-powerful-open-hardware-risc-v-linux-sbc-targets-ai-applications/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/01/13/beaglev-powerful-ope... Says the early boards in March won’t have a GPU but the production boards in September will have an Imagination Technologies GPU. And apparently they will make a OpenGL driver for it...
- justicezyx 6y agoI do not really use such devices. Can someone let me know, is there other use cases of such devices than prototyping/hobby?
- throwawayffffas 6y agoDoes anybody know if there is SBC with a large RISC-V cpu (8, 16 or more cores)?
- alexhutcheson 6y agoWhat’s the relationship between this project and BeagleBoard.org?