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BeagleV-Ahead open-source RISC-V single board computer
- elromulous 3y agomicroUSB, microHDMI Why? This came up in the thread about the new rpi. These connectors have no place in 2023.
- kqr2 3y agoAlso has a US $150 price tag.
- NewJazz 3y agoMaybe to conserve board space? I'm curious why you think these connectors have no place in 2023... They are fragile, sure, but I'm not sure they are entirely useless.
- elromulous 3y agoThey're fragile, and they don't save any/appreciable board space over USB C. And for the price ($150), USB C is easily justified.
- NewJazz 3y agoAltmode DP has been challenge going for board builders to integrate as far as I've seen. I guess it is a complete replacement for micro USB, though.
- missjellyfish 3y agoIf so, I'd much rather have miniDP. Better connector, better standard, it talks HDMI anyway if you want to, and you will need an adapter anyway.
- FreeFull 3y agoAlso, if you include miniDP and don't include HDMI, you don't have to pay the HDMI licensing fees.
- mmac_ 3y agoMany of these SoC have HDMI directly from the IC without needing additional hardware converters. Something like DP you need a converter IC which adds expense and board space/complexity. Something like MIPI -> DP, I think TI makes some chipsets that do this. The size is probably to save space on the board - looks like they try to keep to relatively the same size and mounting holes as previous boards. I have an entire box of these mini-normal converter cables because of boards like this. OK when messing around but I can see the frustrations if you're not used to it.
- bsder 3y agoBlame the SoC manufacturer for not supporting something newer? If you want to support Thunderbolt or DP, you're looking at a lot of extra hardware (if the SoC even has a way of talking that quickly off-chip) or you need support directly on the SoC. If you don't support Thunderbolt or DP, what other video interface is there but some variant of HDMI? As for the lack of USB-C interfaces on this or the RPi, think for a minute about why you don't see 7-port USB-C hubs and see a maximum of 4 USB-C ports on laptops. USB-C even before PD might have to source 5V at 3A. That's 15W of power for every port--that's almost higher than the power spec for a 7-port USB 2.0 hub! I will, however, concede the point about the really stupid micro-USB 3.0 connector for power. That's just incredibly dumb. This is a Chinese-made board--shrug--presumably LCSC was running a special. I do agree that any system like this should be designed with USB-C PD since peripherals are going to suck down power even if the board itself can work with 5V/900mA.
- numpad0 3y agoI was hallucinating the text to follow "microUSB 3.0 is indeed weird..." and realized what it is. There is practically no implementation ambiguity in microUSB 3.0. No USB-PD, USB-BC, or USB Billboard class, just plain old - if there was such a thing - USB 3.0. So it's non-ideal but zero risk option that comes with tolerable cost. MicroHDMI, idk.
- shrubble 3y agoIt's sad that TI never pressed their advantage with their chip, never offered anything to serve as an upgrade; so much that now the BB form factor remains but the TI chips are gone...
- dragontamer 3y agoThe TI-based BeaglePlay Connect (also released a few months ago) seems like a superior buy actually. BeagleV-Ahead is interesting, but I think most people who are doing hobby embedded projects would prefer to use the TI-based BeaglePlay. BeaglePlay is supporting single-pair Ethernet for example (I forget which version though... I think the "not-CANbus replacement" one but I dunno for sure). As well as LoRA. And at $99 its cheaper too. And they've also got BeagleConnect-Freedom boards to easily integrate that LoRA radio.
- deadly_syn 3y agoAutomotive grade ethernet iirc is just using ethernet for either the same or a new fully deterministic network standard.
- dragontamer 3y agoSPE is a newish (2018?? standardized) 2-wire power+data twisted pair for 1km wire lengths at 10 Mbit. It's expensive to play with right now. But the specs are cool. 1km lengths is nuts, and a PoE-like feature on a singular twisted pair minimizes the wiring requirements on industrial scale plants. Hobbyists probably should stick to PoE honestly. But playing with new protocols is still fun.
- niles 3y agoLoRa for radio LoRA for LLM refinement
- happycube 3y agoTI took several steps back by ending the OMAP line, but they're still designing chips even though they're not quite on the bleeding edge anymore. The PRUs are still there for now, but not very well supported. (You do get multiple Cortex R's.) Once the RP1 is fully documented and exploited the PI5 will probably become even more popular for hobbiest IO, but that's in a different market really. The Jacinto7 line is still pretty popular in some circles and there are some boards around the series. It's a bit of a confusing line though since the same dies are offered in multiple product lines targeted for different markets. Beaglebone AI64 (TI TDA4VM, 2xA72, 4GB, NVMe, $185) : https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglebone-ai-64 https://www.beagleboard.org/boards/beaglebone-ai-64 TI SK-AM69 (AM69 - same die as TDA4VH, $400, 8xA72, 32GB RAM, PCI-e, NVMe): https://www.ti.com/tool/SK-AM69 https://www.ti.com/tool/SK-AM69 If the SK-AM69 supported transformer models (i.e. llama.cpp) in it's NPU it would probably be perpetually out of stock.
- thinkerswell 3y agoHow long before we have RISC V processors powering Linux PCs with no “Secure Enclave” that has root on your system? Also playing games on it would be nice.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoYou probably want a secure enclave as otherwise you won't have a good way to secure keystores. With Webauthn and keypasses becoming more widely adopted, not having a secure computation environment means you will be at risk of having your login data exfiltrated by random apps.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- no_time 3y agoI’m more concerned about tech companies being more of a “superuser” on the machine I have paid for and own, than me. Stallman saw this coming decades ago. And I firmly believe he will be proven right in due time. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html
- goodpoint 3y agoMany people saw it coming even before Stallaman.
- sys_64738 3y ago> I’m more concerned about tech companies being more of a “superuser” on the machine I have paid for and own, than me. Don't run Intel and AMD CPUs then!
- thinkerswell 3y agoIt would be nice to have a riscV option that doesn’t include these.
- 3y ago
- FpUser 3y agoAll was fine until I clicked "buy" link and saw the price. Sorry but I could get way more compute power for this price
- toenail 3y agoIs it open source RISC-V?
- FpUser 3y agoTo me it does not matter. I am buying Teensy like boards for small scale production and said production is out of the question with this kind of price. For my own use - as already said I'll get something much more powerful for the same money.
- snvzz 3y ago>I am buying Teensy like boards for small scale production This board is on a much bigger scale, both in compute power and in size. It is a SoC mounted on a SBC, not a MCU devboard. You'd be better off looking elsewhere, like ESP32-C series or Milk-V Duo. This list[0] might prove helpful. 0. https://codeberg.org/20-100/Awesome_RISC-V/src/branch/master/RISC-V_MCU_development_boards.pdf https://codeberg.org/20-100/Awesome_RISC-V/src/branch/master...
- unwind 3y agoIs this: 50GFLOPS, 3Mpixel/s Imagination BXM-4-64 graphics processing unit (GPU) A typo on the fillrate? It has to be 3 billion pixels/s, right? At 3 million you can't fill 640x480 VGA at 10 fps, even ...
- ralferoo 3y agoThis [1] would suggest that a single BXM-4-64 integrated on an SoC can get up to about 4 gigapixels/s assuming the memory interface can manage it. I found another article [2] that talks about both the BeagleV and another board using the same chip, the LiceePi4a [3] which says "50.7GFLOPS, Fill 3168M pixels/s". As the designs are probably very similar, it almost certainly is a typo. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16155/imagination-announces-bseries-gpu-ip-scaling-up-with-multigpu/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16155/imagination-announces-b... [2] https://riscv.org/blog/2023/07/the-release-of-the-first-two-mass-produced-development-boards-aosp-powered-by-th1520-soc/ https://riscv.org/blog/2023/07/the-release-of-the-first-two-... [3] https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a https://sipeed.com/licheepi4a
- unwind 3y agoPhew, that surely makes more sense. Great links too, thanks a lot!
- NewJazz 3y agoSooo... How open is this board? The core designs are XuanTie, which is open / royalty free. What about the GPU? Are any schematics or data sheets posted for the board? Design files?
- ur-whale 3y ago> Are any schematics or data sheets posted for the board? Design files? Agree. And some VHDL / Verilog while we're at it.
- RetroTechie 3y agoAfaik TH1520 SoC includes an Imagination BXM-4-64 gpu: https://www.imaginationtech.com/products/gpu/img-b-series-gpu/ https://www.imaginationtech.com/products/gpu/img-b-series-gp... They appear open source friendly, but both this gpu & SoC being fairly recent, we'll have to wait & see how this goes. GPU design itself is closed, like for practically any other (modern) gpu. No doubt this board will have many applications. With this powerful cpu+gpu, desktop replacement could be among those. But lack of regular USB connectors (or external hub required) is a big drawback. Also I prefer RPi style gpio header. But that's just me.
- unpopularopp 3y agoSorry if it’s a dumb question but how do you verify open source hardware? With software I have the code and I can build and deploy my own version. But how do you do that with an open source CPU? I can read the code [0] but will the CPU as the physical object itself be the same? And the microcode running inside? 0, https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910 https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910
- phendrenad2 3y agoThere really is no open-source hardware, not below the centimeter level. You have to trust some company to actually make your chip. I guess you could get an electron microscope and look at every transistor, but that's probably not realistic, even for most companies.
- no_time 3y agoYou don’t. Open hardware is a positive for the company and almost entirely neutral for the consumer. I guess you could say It’s a positive for us too, since you are not subsidizing the ARM royalties with every tech purchase you make. But I wouldn’t bet on this cost cutting being passed down to us.
- imiric 3y ago> Open hardware is a positive for the company and almost entirely neutral for the consumer. I'd say it's the other way around, actually. And possibly a negative for the company in the current market, since it also needs to worry about competition based on their sources. The same as with open source software. It's entirely positive for the consumer, since it gives them the choice to choose between several manufacturers of the same design, or even manufacture the product themselves, if they have the capability. Open hardware is the end goal of the right to repair movement, in this sense. Even if the consumer doesn't have the capability to verify that the product they're using was built from open sources, they still retain their rights to modify, build and distribute their own versions. This is what "open" means. Note that this is the case with OSS too. It would be very difficult to prove that a specific binary was built from a specific source, but there's usually a degree of trust that the binaries provided by the developers were built from the same source the user has access to. The developers can also provide a mechanism for this to be validated, via checksums, reproducible builds, etc. I imagine that a similar mechanism might exist for hardware as well.
- IshKebab 3y agoI'm not sure I would buy a RISC-V board yet. In particular it is still in the stage where knowledge about the platform has to be hard coded rather than probed at runtime. For example the location of MMIO devices like CLINT (time/interrupt controller) and physical memory attributes. The spec says something like "the platform must provide a method for software to discover this" but it doesn't specify how and as far as I know the current method is that it should read the manual! There is a placeholder CSR mconfigptr that I believe is intended to fix this by pointing to a DeviceTree blob which would solve this (someone correct me if I'm wrong) but none of that is standardised yet. I work on RISC-V and I think it's great and ARM should be very very worried but if you buy this you're on the bleeding edge and don't expect the software experience you'd get on x86 or even RPi. Give it a few years and I expect the story will be very different.
- ChickeNES 3y agoI think the solution is simple: ACPI
- IshKebab 3y agoI don't have any experience of ACPI but it doesn't not sound like a sane alternative to DeviceTree: https://stackoverflow.com/a/56235466/265521 https://stackoverflow.com/a/56235466/265521 > ACPI is the unprofessional, hackish attempt of bios and board vendors to solve a small subset of the problems that DT already solved long ago. > In November 2003, Linus Torvalds—author of the Linux kernel—described ACPI as "a complete design disaster in every way". I'm not sure Linus has the best design sense but it doesn't sound like he is wrong here: > Much of the firmware ACPI functionality is provided in bytecode of ACPI Machine Language (AML), a Turing-complete, domain-specific low-level language, stored in the ACPI tables.[7] To make use of the ACPI tables, the operating system must have an interpreter for the AML bytecode. A reference AML interpreter implementation is provided by the ACPI Component Architecture (ACPICA). At the BIOS development time, AML bytecode is compiled from the ASL (ACPI Source Language) code. Wtf.
- ahoka 3y ago
- dragontamer 3y agoVery interesting for... other reasons. I thought that Beagle Company was more tied to TI chips than this, I didn't expect a non-TI chip to come out of their boards. Historically, Beagle has aimed at SBCs that are "weaker" than Rasp. Pi but far more "open". I trust their branding and the company. I don't consider them fully open (like Linux4Sam / Microchips stuff, which have open source U-Boot and other bootloaders immediately available for download). But open source is a "sliding scale", and Beagle has consistently been "more open" than most competitors. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good here, there will be far better drivers than Rasp. Pi (the biggest name competitor for sure). BeagleBoards tend to be in the 1W to 5W region, while Rasp. Pis consistently are 5W+ (with the most recent Rasp. Pi even having a 20W+ adapter but probably averages at half that). RP4 averaging around 6W, so well above BeagleBoard stuff. Note that Rasp. Pi wins in overall compute-per-watt metrics, but also note that Xeon / EPYC are far more efficient in compute-per-watt. So... nobody should be using Rasp. Pi (or Beaglebones) for efficient computer. These are computers that "must" fit inside the 6W or 2W or whatever power-envelopes you needed. (Ex: running off of 1x 18650 Li-ion cell, or a solar-battery setup trying to shrink the size of the power-system)
- geokon 3y agoYou typically pay a premium for Beagleboards for the IO features (though at a glance this particular board doesn't look particularly interesting) If you want an open RPi equivalent, I'd look more at LibreComputer boards. Cheap and open
- dragontamer 3y agoWell, we're paying a premium for Beagleboards because they're lower volume and that's pretty much it. Volume is king for prices in the computer world. But... you get better IO yes, but also more importantly IMO, more open hardware designs. Ex: I'm pretty confident in being able to get an AM355x TI chip and (with enough effort on a PCB CAD tool) creating my own Beaglebone Black/Green. (Note that OSHPark offers 6-layer boards which should be good enough to route-out impedance controlled DDR to a BGA chip like the AM355x series... though it'd be tight). BeagleBone AI and BeaglePlay have upped the complexity so I'm not sure if they'd fit on 6-layers, but they're open-enough designs that if I were to create a custom 8-layer or 10-layer run, it probably is doable.
- neilv 3y agoWhat is TI's angle here? (Asked naively by a software person.) Is TI hoping to grab RISC-V developers/enthusiasts with the Beagleboard now (keep them from moving to Chinese RISC-V SBCs), and later migrate these users to a TI RISC-V SoC & Beagleboard when it's ready? Is this a royalties negotiating tactic with Arm? Odd negotiating tactic with US lawmakers (e.g., "If we're restricted too much in international engineering collaboration, we'll have to source a black box from China, and put it into everything")? Symbolic deal with some entity in China? Some Beagleboard business unit trying to increase its own profitability, not just a devboard to promote TI chip products? Something else?
- phkahler 3y ago>> What is TI's angle here? This isn't TI. Read the bottom of the page, it's a Michigan based nonprofit.
- neilv 3y agoIs there an evolving relationship between TI and BeagleBoard.org? > The BeagleBoard is a low-power open-source single-board computer produced by Texas Instruments in association with Digi-Key and Newark element14. The BeagleBoard was also designed with open source software development in mind, and as a way of demonstrating the Texas Instrument's OMAP3530 system-on-a-chip.[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeagleBoard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeagleBoard That page includes the BeagleV-Ahead.
- cushychicken 3y agoTI kinda sorta helped start BeagleBoard. The founder of BeagleBoard was a former TI sales or applications engineer. TI has always had a strong hand in BB hardware design because it’s effectively a reference design for them.
- skykooler 3y agoSimilar to how the Raspberry Pi was developed by former Broadcom engineers and as such uses their CPUs.
- Havoc 3y agoWho is the target audience for this? It's progressing fast which is great but they're not yet competitive vs some random ARM board. So who is buying these in this sorta "catching up" phase?
- rwmj 3y agoThe C910 has a few hardware bugs you should be aware of: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-riscv/20230910082911.3378782-10-guoren@kernel.org/ https://lore.kernel.org/linux-riscv/20230910082911.3378782-1... https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/opensbi/2023-September/005587.html https://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/opensbi/2023-September... https://github.com/revyos/revyos/issues/17 https://github.com/revyos/revyos/issues/17
- edwintorok 3y agoThanks for pointing these out. I was not sure whether I should wait for Horse Creek or get the MilkV now, but with all these bugs I'd rather wait and see which one will be less buggy.
- moffkalast 3y agoA floating point hardware bug? Was this designed by the Intel Pentium team or what?
- stefan_ 3y agoYikes, that last one seems bad (although I don't think there is too much software making use of floating point exceptions).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- smcleod 3y ago$248AU per unit…. That is insanely expensive!
- devdiary 3y agoThank you for sending me down the rabbithole of RISC :)
- whoiscroberts 3y agoIt’s always great to see a new riscv offering. I’ve recently started to take an interest in hardware, I’ve always been a high level software person. I, just yesterday actually, purchased a VisionFive2 risc sbc.
- sys_64738 3y agoThe best RISC-V chips are from China based companies.
- sillywalk 3y agoSpecs: Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC 2GHz quad-core RISC-V 64GC Xuantie C910 3-issue 8-execution superscalar with out-of-order issue/completion/retirement 64KB I and 64KB D L1 per core 1MB shared L2 cache 4TOPS@INT8 neural processing unit (NPU) @ 1GHz 50GFLOPS, 3Mpixel/s Imagination BXM-4-64 graphics processing unit (GPU) 2x image signal processor (ISP) Video codecs H.265/H.264 @ 4Kp75 decode H.265/H.264 @ 4Kp40 encode 4GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, PHY: AP6203BM for Wifi/Bluetooth, Realtek RTL8211F-VD-CG Gigabit Ethernet, microsd, microUSB, micro HDMI.
- my123 3y agoThe XuanTie C910 is a shockingly slow RISC-V CPU core, don't expect miracles out of this one... (performs _far_ below the advertised A72-class numbers in practice)
- eterevsky 3y agomicro-USB 3.0? Why?