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VisionFive 2 kickstarter, $49 4 GB 64 bit quad core 1.5 GHz RISC-V

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brucehoult:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2

4 GB board in November, 2 GB and 8 GB in February. My total charge for the 4 GB super early bird board including shipping to New Zealand is SG$80 (US$57.27, NZ$92.74, AU$83.35, £48/69, €57.75)

Imagination Tech BXE-4-32 GPU. They've been promising open source drivers. Hopefully that happens. Imagination have also announced their own RISC-V cores, so they're serious about supporting RISC-V and may have really turned over a new leaf after getting dumped by Apple.

Officially announced with Debian and Fedora support. Ubuntu are already supporting the (dual core, 1.0 GHz, no GPU) VisionFive 1, so I'm sure they'll be in, and others too.

Between Pi 3 and Pi 4 performance, except this generation of RISC-V doesn't yet have SIMD/Vector or crypto (SHA, AES) acceleration. Next year's SoCs will.

Has Micro SD, SPI flash, eMMC, M.2 M-key for SSD (or WIFI if you prefer). Dual gig ethernet, HDMI 2.0 (4k x30), 2 USB2, 2 USB 3. Pi-compatible GPIO. All that camera and LCD display stuff...

Note: the Pine64 "Star64" using the same SoC but on a larger board with a PCIe x4 slot is expected to be a similar price (not yet announced) and available to order within weeks.

Several other RISC-V SoCs with up to 2x Pi 4 performance (similar to ARM-based RK3588, while this board's SoC is similar to RK3566) are expected to be announced soon, with boards in maybe mid 2023. This tech is not going to stand still in the next few years.

FlyingDutch:
Hi @brucehoult

It seems the Chinese learned their conclusions from the first version of this board. The RISC-V CPU in the first version could not have any GPU, which caused the CPU to saturate (while moving the mouse). On the other hand, the Chinese should be thanked for such a quick introduction of changes "in silicon".

Best regards

Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: brucehoult on August 23, 2022, 09:49:53 am ---Imagination Tech BXE-4-32 GPU. They've been promising open source drivers. Hopefully that happens. Imagination have also announced their own RISC-V cores, so they're serious about supporting RISC-V and may have really turned over a new leaf after getting dumped by Apple.
--- End quote ---
I've been bitten by closed source blobs and forked kernel trees in Linux SBCs enough times to wait until the support is upstreamed to the vanilla Linux kernel tree.  The instability and maintenance hassle and being dependent on the vendor is just not worth it.

Other than that, it definitely looks interesting.  Except..

--- Quote ---Currently we support Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, the kernel will be released on https://github.com/starfive-tech later.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, nah.

brucehoult:

--- Quote from: FlyingDutch on September 06, 2022, 04:54:15 pm ---Hi @brucehoult

It seems the Chinese learned their conclusions from the first version of this board. The RISC-V CPU in the first version could not have any GPU, which caused the CPU to saturate (while moving the mouse). On the other hand, the Chinese should be thanked for such a quick introduction of changes "in silicon".

--- End quote ---

The JH7110 was always the "real" version of the chip. It was originally supposed to have shipped in the BeagleV "StarLight" in September 2021. They made a limited number of JH7100 -- about 300, on a "shuttle run" -- and distributed them to developers for free as the BeagleV "Starlight" Beta board in May 2021.

The JH7100 was never intended for volume production. I was surprised when they announced the VisionFive v1 with it at the end of 2021. I don't know how many chips they made, or whether they actually made production masks for it or just ran the MPW masks a few more times. Given that the VisionFive v1 was sold for three times the price of the VisionFive 2, with the rest of the board almost identical, I strongly suspect that they continued to use (expensive) shuttle run chips for it.

brucehoult:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on September 06, 2022, 08:26:33 pm ---Other than that, it definitely looks interesting.  Except..

--- Quote ---Currently we support Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, the kernel will be released on https://github.com/starfive-tech later.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, nah.

--- End quote ---

That is THE most recent LTS kernel, used in e.g. the current (and supported) Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

The CPU cores and everything out to L2 cache and the buses are straight SiFive U74-MC, with kernel support long since upstreamed. Things such as initialising the DRAM and console UART are the job of U-Boot and OpenSBI, not the Linux kernel.

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