7 ms·
RISC-V single-board computer for less than 40 euros
- deivid 1y agoCan't beat that price, just be warned that it's slower than a Pi 3, probably similar to a Pi 2.
- brucehoult 1y agoIt is not! That is super misleading. For normal program code it is closer to a Pi 4 than to a Pi 3, similar to the all the very popular A55s board that have come out more recently than the Pi 4. The only way it is slower than a Pi 3 is if the Pi 3 program is using SIMD (Neon), which the VisionFive 2 lacks. The worst part of this Pi 3 comparison is that the Pi 3 has only 512MB or 1GB of RAM, which is extremely limiting in the modern world. This RISC-V board comes with a *minimum* of 2GB and is available with 8GB for $37. The RAM difference alone makes many things possible that are impossible on a Pi 3, and many other things much faster, regardless of the raw CPU speed. And then you have the M.2 NVMe SSD, something that neither the Pi 3 nor Pi 4 support, which again makes a whole raft of things much faster, even if the single lane means it can "only" do something near 400 MB/s (vs SD cards at 40 or 80 MB/s)
- deivid 1y agoMaybe the memory of my Pi2 is better than reality. I have a VisionFive2 as part of my lab (next to some arm and x86 sbc), with an nvme disk, and it's unbearably slow. It's still useful for testing platform compatibility, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
- brucehoult 1y agoI certainly wouldn't recommend ANY current RISC-V board as your full time desktop machine for doing everything. Or any Raspberry Pi either. The Orion O6 and the newest Qualcomm stuff is a different matter, and RISC-V will be joining that league next year. But not right now. If you're short on money you can pick up full working systems with Core 2 Duo or early i3/i5/i7 CPUs and proper cases and power supplies and hard disks and monitors and keyboards and mice etc for the same price as a bare SBC -- or even for free. Things no longer supported by Windows or MacOS (and you can't install current versions of software on the old OS versions they do run) run Linux with the latest apps just fine. ANY Intel Mac ever made (right back to 2005) is better than a Pi 5 and you can just slap an Ubuntu installer on a USB stick and install it and everything Just Works. For those who for whatever reason specifically want to use RISC-V software, a VisionFive 2 is faster on a per-core basis than Qemu on a PC -- and a lot cheaper and more power efficient unless that PC already exists and is otherwise not doing anything.
- rwmj 1y agoThe VF2 (original) is a stolid workhorse, as long as you only use it for simple CLI-based stuff. The hardware is very well supported by Linux. The performance isn't great, but I used it to fix hundreds of Fedora packages to add RISC-V support, so you can't really beat its effectiveness. You do want to get the version with the max amount of RAM, and you'll also need to add an M.2 for storage (one PCIe lane!)
- mkesper 1y agoCan you install it without a serial connection? Mine is still collecting dust...
- brucehoult 1y agoI've had a couple of original (kickstarter) VisionFive 2s for 2 1/2 years, use them constantly, and have never used a UART connection with them.
- h3lp 1y agoOn Banana Pi F3, which is similar to VF2, you can boot off SDcard, and transfer the OS to eMMC or M2.
- brucehoult 1y agoFor CLI-based programming work an SSD is unnecessary, an SD card is perfectly fine as long as it's large enough to hold all your stuff and you have enough RAM to cache the frequently-used bits. The difference will be measured in a couple of dozen seconds on an hour-long build. SD cards have the very great advantage that you can have multiple ones with different OSes or versions and swap them in seconds.
- tremon 1y agoHow long does the average SD card last in a build machine? I thought these cards only have write endurance of a few thousand cycles?
- aarroyoc 1y agoI'm a happy owner of an original VF2. However, people buying this board should be aware that the StarFive JH7110 is not compatible with the RVA23 spec, which Ubuntu said it was the bare minimum for now on and might create some software incompatibilities in the future.
- rwmj 1y agoThere's nothing that's compatible with RVA23 except qemu, and very few boards which are even partially compatible. Ubuntu's decision is a dumb one. This should run Fedora or Debian just fine.
- lambdas 1y agoI don’t think it’s dumb - hasty and premature perhaps. Manufacturers have been shipping boards with flaky RVV support, a years old kernel and undocumented blobs on in house baked OS and calling it a day. Feels like a step towards strong arming them into shipping products that can be supported easier/not being left to rot in a drawer.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoA lot of people would call a hasty, premature decision "dumb". I generally would, at least.
- Pet_Ant 1y ago> Ubuntu's decision is a dumb one. This should run Fedora or Debian just fine. You either pull the future forward, or drag the past. Because of the small market, they decided to forgo generating legacy concerns before they even started seeing mainstream adoption. I like the decision (they are choosing a better foundation) but I can see the merits either way.
- rwmj 1y agoThey should have two streams. For Fedora we've got Fedora vs CentOS Stream, with the latter (going to be) tuned more for RVA23 and server boards.
- fortran77 1y agoYou can get a Pico 2 with a RISC-V core (much less capable platform though) for under 5 euros
- Findecanor 1y agoThe Pico 2 is a microcontroller board, that may run something like CircuitPython. The Vision Five 2 is a 64-bit SBC, capable of running Linux.
- brucehoult 1y agoThe Milk-V Duo is also under 5 euro, but is a full 1.0 GHz 64 bit Linux machine with MMU, FPU, 128 bit vector unit. Only 64MB RAM, but the only slightly more expensive Duo 256M and Duo S (512MB) increase that to Pi Zero levels for still under $10.
- nottorp 1y agoWhat's with that cookie dialog on some german sites? I thought I don't understand it because it's in german, but this one seems to be translated and I still can't figure it out. Had to close the site without reading the article, anyone has alternate links?
- anonym29 1y agohttps://archive.is/bTEse https://archive.is/bTEse
- andix 1y agoIt's just 3 buttons, the first one ("Zustimmen" / Accept) closes it right away.
- nottorp 1y agoI’m not clear to what I’m agreeing to though. Tracking, I think.
- neilv 1y agoIt's a relatively annoying example of obviously bad faith 'consent' UI. I've decided to treat these as signs that the organization running them is either dishonest or incompetent.
- amatecha 1y agoYeah, that was the most annoying cookie banner I've seen in a while. Better alternative posts that don't coerce you into agreeing to tracking/etc.: https://liliputing.com/starfive-visionfive-2-lite-is-a-cheaper-risc-v-single-board-computer-crowdfunding/ https://liliputing.com/starfive-visionfive-2-lite-is-a-cheap... https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/08/07/visionfive-2-lite-low-cost-risc-v-sbc/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/08/07/visionfive-2-lite-lo...
- anonym29 1y agoUnrelated to the contents of the article itself, but this page is a great example of the UI ramifications of GDPR. On mobile, I get a full screen popup, and there appears to be an "accept all" button, but no "reject all" button. I'm grateful to have tools like uBlock Origin's element zapper for pages like this. For those who don't, here's a version of the page with no full-screen banner: https://archive.is/bTEse https://archive.is/bTEse
- encom 1y agouBlock took care of the cookie law nonsense for me automatically. The internet really is unusable without it.
- 2abcea723a63c9 1y agoGDPR is not that bad actually. The Internet is bad and making itself unusable.
- snackbroken 1y ago> this page is a great example of the UI ramifications of GDPR. Not having an option to reject that is as convenient as the one to accept is not compliant with GDPR.
- rjsw 1y agoYou have the option of closing the window/tab, seems easy enough to me.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoI am not a lawyer, but I am given to understand that the GDPR does not consider that "option" sufficient.
- rjsw 1y agoThe linked site provides the same choice that other publications do, my guess is that they have all checked this with lawyers.
- bobajeff 1y agoI wonder if the future positioning for RISC-V will be better support from manufacturers of SBCs than their ARM counterparts. Right now they are barely useable outside of Raspberry Pi, which unfortunately has had supply issues. I know ARM chip makers can just rely on the smartphone, tablets and Roku market but since there is no such market for RISC-V they sort of have to be good as SBCs.
- adolph 1y agoEspressif seems to have mainstreamed their support for RISC-V alongside Xtensa. Maybe that doesn't count as SBC? But given that Raspberry Pi only has RISC-V cores in the RP2350, it is germane in response to the notion of "barely usable outside of Raspberry Pi."
- bobajeff 1y agoSorry, my comment was not about if RISC-V were in SBCs but about software and documentation support for SBCs outside of Raspberry Pi being very very poor. My hope is that the situation for RISC-V SBCs would be an improvement over ARM SBCs given that chipmakers wouldn't be able to rely on the smartphone market for customers.
- adolph 1y agoYeah, Raspberry Pi has done a great job with documentation and SDKs for SBC and their line of MCU. I don't think Raspberry Pi would have been started outside the margins of the smartphone market economies of scale. Sure RPi are pretty big now but the smartphone market created a world where low power CPUs and a lot of other components are available at all. My recollection is that as RPi got further away from standard chips, they struggled balancing retail availability while servicing their commercial contracts. RISC-V, to me, seems more of an IP hedge for chipmakers who may find themselves constrained in designs or distribution in the future because the IP is controlled by potentially unfriendly companies or jurisdictions. Sure, there are some licensing fees/certifications that are friction, but the goal is independence even at the cost of redundant effort in chip and compiler design.
- blu3h4t 1y agoIsn’t it crazy that we already have riscv rpi like boards what a time to be alive :D Now we only need a graphene phone with riscv. :) No matter if low spec or something if it just works :D Like the Nokia where sailfish was born or something :D
- andix 1y agoThe very limited software support would probably stop me from buying one. Even if there are builds or container images for riscv64, they are probably often not tested at all. Sometimes different architectures have weird quirks (unexpected performance issues for some code, unexpected crashes). I guess only very few maintainers will investigate and fix those. It took quite some time until all software worked perfectly on arm/arm64. When the first Raspberry Pi was released, this was quite a different experience.
- rwmj 1y agoBasically everything works, Linux-wise. Is there particular software?
- ekianjo 1y agoYou probably want to consider the OrangePi RV2 board instead (I wrote about it here: https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-review/ https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-revi...). I own the original VF2 as well, and the RV2 from OrangePi is much faster, and software support is miles better too.
- rcarmo 1y agoYep. I looked at that too: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/12/2230 https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/12/2230 My only gripe is that the OpenWRT image (still) doesn't have Wi-Fi support for some reason.
- sunshine-o 1y agoI am curious: from a security point of view, what are the security tradeoffs and potential advantages of using this type of board today?
- 1oooqooq 1y agoi will bet there are binary blobs you must load in kernel to make this run. or maybe not. who knows? would be nice if that was front and center on any review, but it's never. which leads me to believe it's choke full of binary garbage.
- sneak 1y agoDoes it have any onboard flash? Embedded SBCs that have no wireless and no onboard state (like the RPi3 without wifi) are quite useful for security applications like offline cold signing/CAs. The RPi4/5 have a flashable bootrom now so they don’t qualify any longer. The 1/2/3 load their second stage bootloader from the micro-SD, their first stage is burned at the factory and cannot be modified. If you remove the SD and physically destroy it, they can not persist state or exfiltrate data.
- pinewurst 1y agoI still don't understand why there are not really competitive RISC-V cores in any segment, other than possibly the very race to the bottom.
- pjc50 1y agoIt's "batteries not included": you've got to do your own integration work rather than just license from ARM. And chip companies are pretty risk averse. People generally don't buy instruction sets, they buy solutions.
- Someone 1y agoI don’t think designing a fast CPU gets significantly easier with RISC-V. Yes, you don’t have to design an instruction set, but you still have to pick a good set of RISC-V of extensions, find the right mix of cache size, branch predictor memory size, number of integer and float ALUs, number of rename registers, vector size, etc, glue the parts together so that it all works and build something without hitting patents that others hold. ‘Cheaper’ only at come into view if you’re selling millions of devices, and even then there have been other designs that are similarly open for which you can’t buy really competitive cores.
- jeffbee 1y ago> I don’t think designing a fast CPU gets significantly easier with RISC-V. Waterman, and probably his advisor Patterson, might disagree. The focus of the RISC-V design is avoiding aspects of legacy ISAs that make them harder to implement.
- jabl 1y agoRISC-V has certainly managed to avoid obvious footguns like delay slots or register windows. OTOH there seems to be a lot of people who think RISC-V went too far down the "RISC purity" rabbit hole, and that relying on the C extension is not a good substitute e.g. for lack of more complex addressing modes. Those same people might instead suggest something like aarch64 as an example of a good general purpose ISA. Secondly, for a high performance core, the consensus seems to be that the ISA mostly doesn't matter. The things that make a high performance core are mostly things that happen downstream of the instruction decoders. Heck, even the x86 ISA allows producing some pretty amazingly good cores. Conversely, for a simple in-order cheap core, the ISA matters much more.
- mrweasel 1y agoIs PCI like really expensive? I always wonder why these types of boards are so reluctant to add a PCI-Express slot.
- ryao 1y agoThis is speculation on my part, but: 1. It is non-trivial additional work to add since these are high frequency signals. 2. It is non-trivial additional work to validate. 3. The hardware PCI-E support is likely buggy because it is not well tested and few want to volunteer to spend time working with the SoC supplier on the bugs.
- topspin 1y ago> It is non-trivial additional work to add since these are high frequency signals. And there it is. Yes, PCI-E 3.0 from 2010, 15 years ago, involves 4 GHz wire level signals. A 4x PCI-E connector has four differential pairs of this, not cross-talking, not violating EMC limits, etc. This requires excellent layout and high quality PCBs with enough layers. Never mind 4.0, 5.0... People just do not appreciate what their expectations entail. A recent discussion about "soldered" RAM in the Framework Desktop thread illustrates this, where someone just can't accept that there are reasons for the things board designers do. After you get done routing the display connector, multiple ethernet, USB, DRAM and all the other high frequency stuff on a couple square inches of low cost PCB, there isn't much room for the stretch goal of PCI-E good enough to get through EMI testing. It is possible. Raspberry Pi did it. But it's a question of cost, talent and time-to-market.
- Dylan16807 1y ago> And there it is. Yes, PCI-E 3.0 from 2010, 15 years ago, involves 4 GHz wire level signals. A 4x PCI-E connector has four differential pairs of this, not cross-talking, not violating EMC limits, etc. Well this board does have a lane. And that's within spitting distance of USB 3 which has some pretty cheap implementations. Entire USB 3 hubs cost $2.
- ConanRus 1y ago[dead]
- asimovDev 1y agoCan something like this be powered by PoE? Aparently PoE hats for RPi are compatible with vf2 but results vary
- geerlingguy 1y agoThe easiest way would be to buy a PoE adapter that takes in PoE and splits to Ethernet + USB-C power plug. I use those with many boards (even Pis from time to time, if a HAT won't fit), and they work as long as you only need a few watts.
- asimovDev 1y agoOh those exist, true. I have a PoE switch where I am not using any of the PoE ports so I have a fantasy of having multiple RPi's or other single board computers being powered by PoE running various stuff for my home. Also I had to spit take when I noticed the username. Absolutely love your YouTube channels, thank you for taking so much time creating high quality videos.
- zx8080 1y ago> Welcome to heise online. We and our up to 185 partners use cookies and tracking technologies. Advertisers consent for the profiling purposes is required to read this page. 185 advertising companies. WTF.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 1y agoAdd cmp.* to your ad blocker.
- charcircuit 1y agoHow do you expect ad auctions to work? Every bidder needs to know what they are bidding on.
- sexeriy237 1y agoI expect them to fuck off
- boesboes 1y agoThis. Also, I cannot imagine this is legal under the GDPR; as your options are: pay or accept surveillance
- kingstnap 1y agoI mean reading some tech news article isn't like rent or groceries or healthcare or something. No one is forcing you to use the website, so just closing the tab is always an option.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 1y agoIf your business model requires privacy infringing tracking to be viable, it's the business model that is the problem.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoThey can bid on the page content. If you're advertising embedded systems for such, you can advertise on a page about embedded boards; you don't need to stalk users in order to bid on them personally.
- Manfred 1y agoI would love if this had a more open graphics processor, the IMG BXE requires close source firmware so it's not really great for hobby OS development.