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mrweasel
1vuio0pswjnm7
On the systems I can control, I do all work "disk-less". I strongly prefer it. I like to keep programs and data segregated. The basic setup on NetBSD is as follows, with endless variations possible therefrom. The kernel(s) and userland(s), along with bootloader(s), are on external media, like an SD card or USB stick, marked read-only. There's a RAM-disk in the kernel with a multi-call binary-based userland (custom-made using BusyBox or crunchgen). After boot, a full userland from external media or the network is mounted on tmpfs-based or mfs-based overlay and then we chroot into the full userland. From there, the work space is all tmpfs (RAM).^1 I can experiment to heart's content without jeopardising the ability to reboot into a clean slate. The "user experience" is also much faster than with disk-based. Any new "data" that is to be retained for future use across reboots is periodically saved to some USB or Ethernet connected storage media. I do not use "cloud" for personal data. Sorry. This forces me to think carefully about what needs to be saved and what is just temporary. It helps prevent the accumulation of cruft. The number one benefit of this for me though is that I can recover from a crash instantly and without an internet connection. No dependencies on any corporation.
This BeagleV looks like it would work well for me as it has Ethernet and USB ports.
1. With NetBSD, I can run out of memory with no major problems. With Linux, this has not been the case. I have to be more careful.
znpy
> 1. With NetBSD, I can run out of memory with no major problems.
Could you elaborate a bit more on that, please ?
It's been a while since I last touched NetBSD, but I don't remember anything special regarding that aspect.
knorker
The OOM killer makes running out of memory on Linux not fun. I've found that turning of overcommit avoids this problem.
Then again, I've seen BSDs handle it even worse.
1vuio0pswjnm7
I disable swap. If I run out of RAM, thrashing may occur but it is not fatal. Some process that needs to write to "disk" might fail, but the system does not. I just delete some file(s) to free up the needed RAM, restart the process and continue working. I don't think NetBSD has anything like "OOM killer".
Note that one drawback with "disk-less" via read-only SD card or USB stick is how to have a good source of entropy at boot time.
lovelyviking
This is interesting setup. Do you know a good guide for such setup?
1vuio0pswjnm7
I actually came up with this myself just playing around with NetBSD. You will probably not find anyone advocating disabling swap. I do not run X11 anymore. I stay in VGA textmode. Doubt anyone would want to do exactly what I do. NetBSD users tend toward DIY and each has their own preferences. If you study how NetBSD's install media are created that will teach you almost everything you need to know. Happy to walk you through it though if you want to try NetBSD.
Chromebooks are claimed to be 100% safe from certain types of attacks. The developers came up with this silly "whitewash" gimmick. Their motivation for a disk-less-like system is to force users to store personal data in the cloud. Ugh. Well, the disk-less systems I have been creating for recreational use long before Chromebooks existed are just as safe. Probably safer because I do not use a graphics layer or a web browser with Javascript interpeter.
brucehoult
https://www.crowdsupply.com/sifive/hifive-unmatched
PCIe, 16 GB DDR4, two M.2 (one for storage, one WIFI), quad core 1.5 GHz (same cores as this board, but twice as many)
kwdc
Sensible spec. The price isn’t outlandish for what is basically a desktop with a relatively exotic CPU. 16GB ram is minimum for development in my view even though you can do a lot in 8GB.
I'm sure people would start comparing it pricewise to a i7 or something made at significant economies of scale. I think that is an unfair comparison due to the exotic CPU. Exotic in the sense that these aren't commodity CPUs.
mrweasel
That's a little costly, but I guess development of a board like that isn't cheap.
brucehoult
Existing is the first step. Prices will reduce in time -- probably quite rapidly.
edsouza
The board has 16GB DDR4 memory on board, that's probably one of the most costly components.
seabird
You would have to integrate a storage controller into your design and verify that it works. It's not insurmountable, but it's engineering time that has to go toward something that a lot of people aren't ever going to use, along with an increase in BOM cost.
stormbrew
My pet peeve about all these small single board computers is that none of them have multiple ethernet ports, which severely limits their usefulness as networking hardware. They'd otherwise be very well suited to being various kinds of packet routing appliances.
You can sometimes hang a usb ethernet dongle off them but performance on those tend to be somewhat limited.
johnwalkr
Check out solidrun, they have a variety of boards with multiple Ethernet ports.
I used to wonder why embedded boards didn’t have multiple Ethernet boards and why it’s not common to use ethernet to connect to peripherals instead of “old interfaces”. Until I tried it for a project. It turns out Ethernet uses roughly 0.5 to 2W per port depending on speed (that’s 1-4W per connection).
guidoism
Several of the boards from Friendly ELEC have dual ethernet: https://www.friendlyarm.com
gorgoiler
I use consumer (Netgear) switches with VLAN support to enforce network separation.
The actual routing is done as a router-on-a-stick. It’s not perfect but it’s simple, scalable, and reliable.
exporectomy
Perhaps what you want is a range of boards with many combinations of features. Some with 4xethernet, some with 2xethernet, some with PCIE and 1xethernet, some with M.2 and PCIE, some with M.2 and 2xethernet, etc. to fill out that big matrix of combinations. But is the market big enough for such a huge range to be economical?
Some of them have PCIE which you could connect a network card to. That seems like a more practical way to allow flexibility than having a lot of special purpose boards.
bentcorner
Depending on your bandwidth (especially if you have an asymmetric connection like cable) using it as a router-on-a-stick with vlans should work.
On lower end hardware you'd probably get higher throughput over the single link than trying to add a USB LAN adapter to it.
vhodges
You might be interested in the RockPro64 which comes with a PCIe 2.0x4 slot for all your HBA needs.
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/ROCKPro64
https://pine64.com/product/rockpro64-4gb-single-board-comput...
wipt
The support for PCIe cards is very limited on that board. I've spent too much time trying to get a disk controller to work, and I'm not alone. I ended up buying old server boards with low power xeon processors to accomplish my goal.
mlyle
No, not too complicated, though connectors of all kinds take lots of space (both physical space and routing). Not to mention the amount of power that SATA drives might take.
HardKernel/ODroid has things like the oDroid-HC4.
Also, USB3-to-SATA isn't completely crazy to do.
Octoth0rpe
FWIW, I believe the IO boards available for the Pi4 CM variants have a PCIe slot that could use used for storage: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...
Lack of sata/m.2 port is very frustrating to me.
mbreese
You can certainly use the PCIe support on the RPi 4 CM with a SATA controller. Either with a PCIe SATA card on the IO board you linked, or by building a custom board.
The Turing Pi project looks to do that with their next version: https://turingpi.com/v2/
Should be much more stable than a USB3 connection.
qwerty456127
Why would you need SATA when you have SD, also USB3 and Gigabit Ethernet? I have no problem booting from the SD then accessing data on my SATA drives using a USB-attached controller, also plan to get a NAS.
Sure, it would be great to have connectors for everything and support for every cool standard but these guys have to give up all what is non-essential to keep it small, cheap and possible to engineer by a small team.
cogman10
Honestly I just wish there was a faster standard than SD. 100MB/s for solid state is just incredibly slow now-a-days.
There's no reason you couldn't kick SD transfer speeds up towards SSD speeds other than the protocol doesn't allow for it.
blkbjhjkl
I wish folks would stop conflating boot media and root media. There's no reason your SD card has to consist of anything more than u-boot.
SD is fantastically simple, so that the boot rom can get at a bootloader without much effort (generally the bootrom just looks at a memory offset on the mmc device). Once you start speaking newer faster protocols, this simplicity is lost. You're not likely going to find a bootrom that implements all the bits needed to get u-boot from a sata device.
In a perfect world, once these are no longer developer devices, the mmc would be replaced with some spi flash (or even an emmc) with just u-boot.
On 90% of embedded dev systems, you're better off thinking of the sd card as a "bios chip" then a hard drive. The fact you can also use it as a block device to store a rw filesystem is almost incidental, and should probably be avoided.
qwerty456127
The existence of Raspberry Pi as it is, Raspberry Pi 4 in parricular, is is a huge leap forward for the humanity already. The next leap is going to be the same kind of board but with no connectors besides an increasing number of full Thunderbolt 4 ports letting you connect anything you can imagine (incl as many GPIO connectors as you need). There is no need in a zoo of connectors like M.2, U.2, SATA, HDMI etc when we can conduct PCIe, DisplayPort and USB over a unified standard wire.
colejohnson66
CFast is CompactFlash, but with a SATA-based interface (up to ~600 MByte/sec) instead of IDE. It was designed because video cameras were making too much data for CF to handle. The downside is its size: 43x36x5 mm vs 15x11x1 mm for microSD.
Also, CFast aren’t as ubiquitous as microSD. I can go to Target or Walmart and get a wide “selection” of microSD, but I’d be hard pressed to find a CFast card. So the chances of an SBC using CFast over eMMC or microSD is low.
panny
>Honestly I just wish there was a faster standard than SD
There is one. It's called UFS 3.0. The Sony Xperia 1 II has it. They're same size as MicroSD, but look slightly different.
https://store.shopping.yahoo.co.jp/rarahu-store/B085B2LTLB.h...
tenebrisalietum
SD cards are fragile.
tubularhells
Because he wants to run a file server from it. This too was my first question.
EamonnMR
I'm running a file server with a pi and a USB enclosure for a huge sata drive, and it works fine. Could be neater though.
TrueDuality
I'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...
Teknoman117
The 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
The rk3328 board I have has been great. Quad Cortex A53, up to 4 GB of RAM, Mali GPU.
lsllc
Robert C. Nelson has been doing a stellar job of maintaining the omap-image-builder repo:
https://github.com/RobertCNelson/omap-image-builder
(and https://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu)
It's pretty easy to use to build an image for Debian Buster/Stretch or Ubuntu Bionic Beaver, he has various configurations that cover IoT, console only/headless, GUI and a few other combos. It's pretty easy to create your own config with the Kernel and packages that you want.
The images can be used for flashing to the eMMC via an SD card (or via USB).
I've found images built this way to up very up to date and absolutely rock solid thanks to Robert's curation.
drmpeg
Robert is the best. Looks like he'll be involved with this project too.
bradfa
I'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.
bradstewart
The biggest reason I used them in production devices (and still use them at home) was the eMMC. Which made it well worth the price, even with the slow processor.
We had to work with the Balena.io (formerly resin.io) team to get full hardware support on the BealgeBone Green Wireless (wifi drivers were the biggest hangup, iirc) a few years, but they were incredibly responsive and have done a fantastic job maintaining a stable distro for these boards.
If you want a straightforward out-of-the-box experience, I highly recommend Balena.io.
jandrese
The board I have has only 4GB of MMC on board which wasn't big enough for the later versions of the OS, but you could boot off of the SD instead if you held down a button on the board while powering it up.
There was a way to tweak it so you didn't have to hold the button down, but it was kinda involved IIRC so I never got around to it.
basher
Arstechnica coverage: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/seeed-and-beagleboar...
sradman
> 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-netw...
rhn_mk1
Imagination GPU :( Notorious for being hard to support in open source. I'm not even sure there was a single free driver for those.
That likely means those devices are going to be stuck on an outdated kernel, unless Imagination steps in and provides ongoing binary support for newer kernels for their GPUs like x86 GPU manufacturers do. However, this being RISC-V with 2 existing devices total, I don't count on it.
So close, yet so far.
brucehoult
Imagination have said they're open-sourcing the drivers for the GPU on another RISC-V board that's supposed to be coming soon (PicoRio).
Probably those work here too.
justaj
Is it me or does it really feel obnoxious for vendors to then be claiming their hardware to be "TRULY OPEN SOURCE"?
blihp
Except for cost... which has been a problem for the BeagleBoard line of SBC's since the beginning. They actually predated the original Raspberry Pi by a couple of years but when the Pi came in at ~25% of the cost, they caught up and overtook the BeagleBoard in popularity fast. The BeagleV looks interesting from an early adopter standpoint but the hobbyist market will probably standardize around whatever decent RISC-V board comes in at sub-$50 first.
tyingq
To me, they seem to serve different markets. The various BeagleBoards have more industrial specs like a wider operating temperature range, on-board EMMC, etc. Also, the pair of PRU's make them useful for things where more precise timing is important.
wiremine
> Sounds like a direct competitor to the Raspberry Pi.
I would consider the Black and Green to be competitors too.
Would be really interested to get a good analysis of the Raspberry Pi, BB Black, and this new board.
lsllc
Regarding 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.
samstave
>>*SiFive is strategically leveraging or responding to the geopolitics surrounding Chinese technology.*
interesting subtext.
We should all be debating HW WRT the fact that you can't name a single device (aside from weapons) that does not contain a single-non-chinese-manufactured component...
every phone or machine is almost 100% chinese built.
"designed by apple in cupertino california" (but made with slave labor from congo, china and other countries)
And we already know about all the backdoors both China and the US do...
FFS we have known about Eschelon since the 70s - the carnivor, room 641A, etc... etc....
sradman
Indeed, the geopolitics works both ways. I think the Chinese are looking at RISC-V as a safe-guard against American embargoes of the kind that killed/maimed HiSilicon, the non-Chinese nation-states are looking for full transparency of silicon design, and the manufacturers want full access to a truly global market that includes China. I'm not sure that SiFive RISC-V designs can be competitive with ARM/x64 in the short-term but the geopolitics creates a potential niche.
I think you are conflating assembly and manufacturing. TSMC is Taiwanese and Samsung is South Korean. Personally I'd prefer that all nation-states and their security organizations followed the Golden Rule and promoted free trade rather than protectionism.
> made with slave labor from congo, china and other countries
I don't equate low-wage manufacturing/assembly with exploitation and certainly not slavery but I understand that this is a common metaphor. Contemporary slavery [1] is a real thing and, until I see contrary evidence, I'm assuming it makes zero contribution to high-tech assembly or manufacturing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery#Contemporary_slavery
Narishma
There's something wrong with that page in Firefox. It pegs a whole CPU core and eats tons of memory.
jstgord
Does 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)
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
I suspect an NVIDIA Jetson would be a better choice for this kind of application.
panny
If 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
New Rockchip boards are coming with neural processing units.
filleokus
What 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
Highly 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
Just 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.
rwmj
I 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.
anderspitman
Looks like you can get it from Mouser for $665 as well:
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/SiFive/HF105-000?qs=zW3...
Found that link from this SiFive page:
caeril
This looks great, thanks!
tyingq
The Rpi4B has a Quad-core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5 GHz with 1MB L2 cache. The A72 claims 4.7 DMIPS/MHz.
This board has a Dual-core U74 (RV64GC) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5 GHz with 2MB L2 cache. The U74 claims 2.5 DMIPS/MHz.
So, roughly 1/4 as fast as a RPIi 4B given the roughly half DMIPS/MHz and half the cores?
That, of course, is a really rough guess, ignoring lots of potential variables.
brucehoult
The CPU cores are comparable to the ARM A55, rather than the A72.
It's more MHz and a better uarch than the cores in a Pi 3, so should outperform even the newer Pi 3+ on tasks that don't use NEON and don't use more than 2 cores.
jgjot-singh
Would this have any sort of meaningful impact on sound/music related processing? E.g I am thinking of vst applications running inside DAWs
pedrocr
> 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.
qchris
As an aside, I really wish that these boards would include more than two PWM outputs. The Raspberry Pi has two as well, and it feels really limiting. Analog control instead gets farmed out to microcontrollers, when you could probably make it work with a single board if there were more pins to work with.
Teknoman117
I used to love the beaglebone for that. Run application logic on the main arm core, farm the microcontroller stuff out to the embedded PRU microcontrollers (which could access all the IO functions). Still a single board solution.
qchris
I agree-as far as I know, the BBB had something like 8 PWM channels. I'm not saying you need all of them, but at least 4 seems somewhat reasonable.
Youden
I'm curious, what do you do with so many PWM outputs?
I just play with electronics for side projects but stick to digital for everything, so I'm wondering what I'm missing out on.
qchris
Honestly, I'm still mostly getting started in the area as well, but I'm looking to use them for motor control. An example of this would be this paper [1], which I'm hoping to replicate to some degree, but requires at least 4 PWM outputs. I'm currently planning on using an Odroid-C4, which has 6 PWM outputs.
But the work I've needed to put into that in order to get a motor controller working was way more than I needed than for a RPi4b, since libraries for it already exist for the Pi vs needing to re-write them for the Odroid board. It would have been cool to try it with an open-hardware board as well. But it's not just quadcopters--a lot of other projects like rovers or position control with multiple stepper on different axes benefit from extra PWM, and doing it in software can lead to too much jitter, so the hardware timers are necessary.
[1] https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:946992/FULLTEXT0...
monocasa
It probably means I2S.
pedrocr
Makes sense. Just another digital bus. Bummer.
monocasa
Eh, 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/beagleb...
If you don't care about it being decent, you can just use the PWM channels like the RPi does.
WatchDog
Is the SiFive U74 open source?
I know the RISC-V ISA is, but I thought the SiFive designs were proprietary.
zozbot234
Looks like their Hard IP is proprietary but based on open high-level designs such as Rocket and BOOM. The peripherals situation is mixed, but they've stated in the past that they're quite OK with using open designs whenever feasible.
my123
The high-level design is proprietary too.
As I said elsewhere, SiFive CPUs are just as closed as Arm ones, you just pay a royalty to SiFive instead of Arm.
zozbot234
> The high-level design is proprietary too.
They have source code files for their 'Freedom' core designs up on GitHub under an Apache 2.x license. These can be directly used to evaluate their designs as FPGA soft-cores.
dkjaudyeqooe
This is not correct. Anyone can design and build a RISC-V CPU without ever getting permission from anyone.
Anything that uses the ARM ISA on the other hand requires a (costly) licence from ARM.
SiFive has its own proprietary *implementation" buty that's not required, and there are many free open source implementations.
sitkack
They aren't for the customers of SiFive. What is your greater point with this comment? That SiFive isn't Open Source or that they are equivalent to Arm?
This video from SiFive clearly explains the RISC-V ecosystem and how SiFive is involved.
gjsman-1000
Open 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
> 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.
jdkticom
Correct. This is open at the ISA, PCB and software level, not the chip RTL.
Still, it is a step forward.
For something more open at the RTL level, I'd look at Precuror (https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor) right now.
Speaking as someone at Beagle, we see this board as an important step to more openness in the ecosystem, especially helping software developers improve the state of open source for RISC-V. It is also just a really cool board. Beagle will do more to try to get more openness at the RTL-level moving forward, perhaps even with FPGA boards at an interim step. The shuttle services are starting to make releasing a new chip design in reasonably modern nodes more possible.
ipodopt
Some of them are open source: https://github.com/sifive/freedom
So this board has an open source CPU: https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive1-rev-b
This does not: https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched
Although, I get the feeling they will open source design on a rolling basis. Pure speculation.
stragies
The 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
> that can also freely snoop around your memory.
Can them? Even with IOMMU?
EDIT: I don't think so.
chem83
Is 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?
scoopr
Does 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
As 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
Also, 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...
monocasa
I 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.
Narishma
Anybody know what changed their mind? As I recall, they've always been pretty hostile to open source.
alkonaut
Can 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?
ansible
> Is there anything about RISC-V that is "better" simply because it is a later design than others?
A lot of it is because it is newer, and the designers have learned from previous architectures. It is a relatively clean and straightforward instruction set, designed to be easily and efficiently implemented.
There's not anything that is super crazy revolutionary, in contrast to the (still vaporware) Mill CPU architecture.
> Is it likely to evolve faster because it is open or more modern?
They have a good extension mechanism that allows relatively clean additions to the instruction set. Some of the recent ones like the vector extension aren't finalized yet. Anyone can propose their own extension. Historically, ARM might work with their most important customers to implement an extension, but good luck getting their attention if you're not already paying them millions per year.
drewm1980
The mill has been in development for... 18 ~years now! Soon they will be able to hire engineers who are actually younger than the company. I wonder if there has ever been a tech company that survived so long without bringing a product to market. Duke Nukem Forever took ~14 years.
mhh__
According to Ivan on their forums (so take this with a grain of salt as it's from the horses mouth rather than an external assessment) they were apparently supposed to be levelling-up in the summer of 2020.
They have at least secured a decent patent portfolio, particularly on the belt.
ansible
From what I understand, all the developers have day jobs or are independently wealthy and can afford to work on it without (much?) pay. They haven't accepted VC money, even though that would likely have sped up development considerably.
CyberDildonics
Their product is hardware patents.
tyingq
I 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
> 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?
nickik
WD has their own cores and they are OpenSource. Very nice designs. They also spend a lot of money on the open source ecosystem for chip development.
See:
reportingsjr
How 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.
blihp
Hasn't WD been doing their own silicon (at least from a design standpoint, they still use someone else's fab) precisely because the 'small percentage' ARM charges matters for their margins? In a world where we have ESP-01 boards which retail for $2, even a couple of percent matters.
Narishma
They design them. I don't know if they make them or not.
cbm-vic-20
The ISA is pretty nice, simple, and well documented. And since it's "open", people can create their own implementations. Like this guy, who is creating a RISC-V processor from scratch, without using an FPGA.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEeZWGE3PwbZTypHq00G-...
jdkticom
One of the other replies points to the RISC-V extensions feature. I think for someone who "doesn't care about openness" would at least benefit from that in the architecture. It means the same compiler can be used to bootstrap things and simple steps can be added to greatly optimize specific types of code, like AI stuff. This board really stands out in AI performance.
Also, having things open means that the supply-chain can be more stable, with less chances of a single glitch in the system halting deliveries for any time. This is driving a lot of interest in RISC-V right now.
yiyus
I'm quite excited about vector instructions. The approach used in RISC-V is very refreshing coming from SIMD. But I would not expect an instant impact from a user point of view.
IshKebab
Compared to ARM, nothing significant. They're very similar load-store architectures.
Here's a RISC-V quick reference: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1617/ECAD+Arch/files/docs/...
And ARM: http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~valvano/Volume1/QuickReferenceC...
The main difference is that RISC-V is a lot more modular, so it's going to be difficult to distribute binaries for but more flexible if you're doing something completely vertical. Also a lot of the modules have bundle relatively common/easy instructions with niche/difficult ones. E.g. multiply with divide.
hajile
> The main difference is that RISC-V is a lot more modular, so it's going to be difficult to distribute binaries for but more flexible if you're doing something completely vertical. Also a lot of the modules have bundle relatively common/easy instructions with niche/difficult ones. E.g. multiply with divide.
I don't think it'll be worse than ARM and it's decidedly better than x86.
There are SEVEN major revisions of ARMv8. Then there's v8-R, v8-M, and additional 32-bit variants of each instruction set in addition to both ARMv7 and ARMv6 which also still ship billions of chips per year. Oh, and under pressure from companies, ARM also allows custom instructions now. Those aren't just theoretical either -- Apple at least added a ton of custom matrix instructions to the M1.
For x86, supporting only semi-recent processors (2006 Core or greater) leaves you still checking for support for: SSE3, SSE4, SSE4.1, SSE4a, SSE4.2, SSE5, AVX, AVX2, AVX512, XOP, AES, SHA, TBM, ABM, BMI1, BMI2, F16C, ADX, CLMUL, FMA3, FMA4, LWP, SMX, TSX, RdRand, MPX, SGX, SME, and TME. That's 29 instruction sets and not all of them have use on both Intel and AMD chips.
RISC-V seems at least that cohesive. If you're shipping a general purpose CPU, you'll always have mul/div, compression, fusion (not actually instructions), privilege, single precision, double precision, bit manipulation, and probably a few others.
Where you'll run into mul/div missing or no floats are microcontrollers or "Larabee" style GPU cores. In all of those cases, you'll be coding to a very specific core, so that won't really matter.
Thankfully, we've had ways to specify and/or check these kinds of things for decades.
IshKebab
> leaves you still checking for support for: SSE3, SSE4...
Find me a processor that supports SSE4 but not SSE3. That's the problem. With x86 you pretty much can say "we're targeting processors made after 2010" or whatever and that's that. You make one binary and it works.
RISC-V allows a combinatorial explosion of possible CPUs. You can have a CPU that supports extension X and not Y, but another one that supports Y and not X.
brucehoult
Do you have a reason to think the matrix instructions in the M1 are not those specified in Armv8.6-A?
brucehoult
If you're doing something embedded nothing prevents you implementing multiply but not divide. RISC-V gcc has an option to use an instruction for multiply but runtime library call for divide.
In fact, even if you claim to implement the M extension (both multiply and divide) all that is necessary is that programs using those opcode work -- but that can be via trap and emulate. If your overall system can run binaries with multiply and divide instructions in them then you can claim M-extension. Whether the performance is adequate is between you and your customers. Note that there are also vast differences in performance between different hardware implementations of multiply and divide, with 32-64 cycle latencies not unheard of.
The same applies for implementing a subset of other extensions in hardware. You can implement the uncommon ones in the trap handler if that will meet your customer's performance needs.
IshKebab
Yeah if you're willing to do something completely non-standard of course you can do whatever you want.
> Note that there are also vast differences in performance between different hardware implementations of multiply and divide, with 32-64 cycle latencies not unheard of.
Yes that is exactly the problem.
cmrdporcupine
Interesting, 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.
tyingq
Arstechnica says this:
"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."
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/seeed-and-beagleboar...
Narishma
According 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-ope...
stragies
That means PowerVR, most likely. Bad news, no useable drivers ever existed for mainline linux kernel for any PowerVR CPU
pabs3
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...
farseer
Can't find any cost information
bahorn
The 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
I 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
What 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-ope...
messe
$149 for 8GB of RAM on a RISC-V board is very affordable compared to the previous options.
StreamBright
For that price you can get a decent SOC with ARM64 too.
patrec
That'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.
pjc50
You pay more to have something Free. Software people have yet to realise this reality of the hardware market.
brucehoult
Raspberry 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.
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Is 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).