RISC-V Guns for Raspberry Pi, Legacy Chips

https://spectrum.ieee.org/risc-v-raspberry-pi

by ystad • 4 years ago

105 73 4 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

hajile• 4 years ago

I like the idea, but they need to make the chip actually open so decent drivers can be created. Most non-Pi SBCs are terribly hard to get working.

sitzkrieg2• 4 years ago

the pi is remarkably less open than many of these other sbcs. its just more popular in both developer and mindshare

oneplane6• 4 years ago

The Broadcom chip, yes, but the NDA-encumbered firmware has been reduced to such an extent that you can in fact boot this either fully-functional with very few closed blobs, or almost-fully-functional with no closed blobs at all.

All device drivers onwards are just open and can be kept up to date and used in custom kernels all you want. This is the big difference with other SBCs where you can't really use the devices without closed, version-locked drivers and blobs, and there is no incentive for the manufacturer to make a super-thin encumbered shim to give the most leverage and freedom for everyone else to build on top of that.

The popularity didn't arrive before the intent and work was done to make it hackable, it was the other way around. That, in turn, created the mindshare to make community-driven drivers and alternate firmwares for the VideoCore boot stage.

This is also why they kept the BCM lineage as simple as possible across the PI revisions so all the public reverse engineering and hard work wasn't for nothing and was still portable.

None of this can be said about any RockChip, MediaTek or HiSilicon SoC. Those are more of a consume-and-throw-away type of deal, except for maybe the high-end long-life platforms that share IP with Android devices that also happen to have PM-OS or some XDA fanbase to work on it. Even then they usually lack community knowledge and commercial effort to make it worthwhile.

The closest was the TI-based series like the BeagleBone, and that was for precisely the same reason the Pi got a good start. The bad thing about the BeagleBone was that it didn't have a "see something on your monitor out of the box" experience.

sheepybloke• 4 years ago

Completely agree! I bought a couple of Orange Pi Zero's a while ago to make a small cluster. As soon as you want to do something slightly more than just booting it into linux, you quickly fall into a space with little to no documentation. If you're lucky, you can find a sketchy media share site with some documents, or an abandoned forum post. Incredibly annoying when you just want to get something running.

NelsonMinar• 4 years ago

Good! We need more small systems. Not just CPUs-on-a-board for hackers to prototype with but an alternative to Intel NUCs and smaller fully integrated computers with inexpensive low power CPUs.

It's astonishing to me how behind the ARM ecosystem is on this. I still can't buy something like a low-end amd64 computer easily with ARM. There's a few laptops and a few cantankerous oddballs like the ROCKPro64. Then again it's Pine64 mentioned in the RISC V article, so maybe we have more years of oddballs to go.

qubex2• 4 years ago

I strongly suggest you take a look at the FireFly 3588 ITX board with the latest high-performance Rockchip SoC and PCI-e.

https://en.t-firefly.com/product/industry/itx3588j

aliqot• 4 years ago

before I even look, is this in-stock?

jws2• 4 years ago

That board has the kitchen sink.

4 big cores and 4 little cores at 8nm, 2 gigibit ethernets, an AI processor, Wifi6, 5G, 32G RAM, PCIe 3.0, M.2, 4 SATA, 2 HDMI, VGA, HDMI in, RS232, CAN… and idles at 1.3W. Typical ~4W, max 20W.

$460 for basic 4G RAM, 16G storage, prices go up from there.

MrBuddyCasino2• 4 years ago

    power consumption
    =================
    Idle:    1.3 W
    Normal:  4.8 W
    Max:    20.0 W

Well this looks interesting for a NAS. Not cheap though at $ 459.00 for the most basic package.

goombacloud• 4 years ago

"Supports UEFI Boot" ← This sounds good already for booting generic Linux distributions, now the question is how well the mainline kernel supports this board. Having to use a special-patched kernel is a no-go if you care about using this board after a few years when it becomes niche. The Libre Computer boards are a good example in this regard (https://libre.computer/products/) they are very niche but since the mainline kernel supports them and they use UEFI by default, you can use most generic Linux distros without a problem.

contingencies• 4 years ago

I visited the FireFly offices in Zhongshan a few years ago and expressed interest in helping them get hardware to open source maintainers. A number of devs (predominantly European) expressed interest, I provided the details, and FireFly never sent the hardware. Didn't exactly breed confidence in their brand. The earlier hardware of theirs required off-tree patched kernels to run, and had middling documentation which is far too much development overhead unless you're doing volume. Unsure how much that's changed, I stopped looking.

johnhenry• 4 years ago

Oh, thank goodness! For second, I thought someone was hacking into firearms.

geerlingguy• 4 years ago

For a great overview of the SiFive that's highlighted in this article, check out Explaining Computers' video from May: https://youtu.be/4PoWAsBOsFs

tl;dr the dual core processor is quite slow, but relatively stable running the software that can compile for it so far in Linux.

It seems like Vision Five is at least pushing things forward a bit on the software side, unlike some of the other hardware manufacturers of SBCs.

2Gkashmiri• 4 years ago

this person makes one important point with regards to the reasons for adaptability of RISC-v. X86 is a monopoly of the US government via intel and amd. they can literally force these companies to pull out of a nation, crippling their entire life through and through.

people do not like that believe it or not. its not fun having the USA hold your country hostage because you do not have alternatives. ARM is the same so RISC-V is a good contender to get behind for entire nations because they can fall back on this and besides, if there is no monopoly of x86/arm in the first place because RISC-v or some other architecture is common, the american armtwisting is reduced as the attack surface would be smaller.

china, russia, iran, india can develop their own thing, separate or together but not dependent on american generosity that can turn hostile, as it has in the past

nsxwolf2• 4 years ago

What is a "RISC-V gun"?

goodpoint• 4 years ago

An artifact of bad writing.

inetsee• 4 years ago

I believe the meaning is that RISC-V is trying to take market share from Raspberry Pi and Legacy Chips. It's a rarely used meaning for the word "guns" which is probably why it's confusing. A better title might be "RISC-V Seeks to Challenge Raspberry Pi and Legacy Chips".

wbsss44123• 4 years ago

It’s a quite commonly used meaning of “guns” though, at least in American English.

wbsss44123• 4 years ago

I’m assuming English isn’t your first language?

Gun/gunning for is a term of phrase that means that one is trying to win/unseat another in a competitive sense.

“Guns” is a verb in the title, not a noun.

nsxwolf2• 4 years ago

I get it now, and feel dumb - the idiom "gunning for", etc. But my brain instantly latched onto it as a noun, and kept imagining some feature of RISC-V that maybe "shoots" code into other chips.

sylware2• 4 years ago

I am still looking for a shmall board with a USB-C connector and tons of GPIOs, with a RISC-V _64bits_ SOC (for keyboards/mice/etc).

mort96• 4 years ago

Why 64-bit exactly? Do you have uses for tiny boards with more than 4GiB of virtual address space?

sylware2• 4 years ago

I would like to write 64bits assembly code paths directly. I know RISC-V ISA has good 64bis->32bits compatibility, but I am looking for something definitive here.

kissiel• 4 years ago

40-pin GPIO Header (28 x GPIO, 12C, 12S, SPI, UART)

12C and 12S - two of my favorite buses!

Are those things really retyped by hand?

bhouston3• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I²S

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I²C

bhouston3• 4 years ago

I would strongly recommend that Raspberry Pi explore a RISC-V line of SBCs. They already have established that they are not locked to ARM with the recent Pico device (https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/), so they might as well do a RISC-V line.

RISC-V is much more open than ARM, but it is definitely lacking in performance and widespread support (and integrated GPU?.) Thus do not dump the ARM line, but add an alternative so as this market further develops, Raspberry Pi is there.

(I found this: https://abopen.com/news/raspberry-pi-foundation-announces-ri...)

fbkr• 4 years ago

Raspberry Pi Pico is ARM though.

suprjami2• 4 years ago

Broadcom don't want an open hardware platform. Look at the license on the Pi bootloader and their legal behaviour when Odroid started selling a Pi clone. The entire Pi hardware ecosystem is setup so that the Pi Foundation are at the top of the food chain and it's been a massive success. RISC-V is the last thing Broadcom want on a Raspberry Pi.

Don't misunderstand this as a criticism either. The rest of the hobbyist SBC ecosystem has had no such guidance or overarching plan, and it's a complete mess of overpriced and/or poorly supported boards. Broadcom put in the hard yards to make their product successful and we're all better off for it.

bhouston3• 4 years ago

Does Boardcom own Raspberry Pi? Or are they independent entities? Is there a contractual obligation between the two that prevents Raspberry Pi from using other CPU vendors?

If there is a requirement to stick with Boardroom, can Broadcom start experimenting with RISC-V? It is probably strategy for Broadcom as well...

BTW I found this: https://abopen.com/news/raspberry-pi-foundation-announces-ri...

klelatti5• 4 years ago

They already have established that they are not locked to ARM with the recent Pico device.

Pico is based on two ARM Cortex M0+ CPUs.

kevwil• 4 years ago

Why is "Guns" capitalized if the word is being used as a verb? Anybody else wonder for a moment what guns have a CPU architecture style? LOL Nobody else? Ok, carry on.

Narishma• 4 years ago

It's capitalized like the rest of the words because it's in a title.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Is there an objective reason to prefer RISC-V over some POWERx generation?

If you were designing a chip to go into a high-end-ish product, would basing it on POWER cause you any greater difficulty than RISC-V?

classichasclass• 4 years ago

The required number of instructions to implement for basic Linux support is rather larger on Power ISA than RISC-V. But you'd have currently better software support as a result, so it may be a wash depending on where your development effort goes.

klelatti5• 4 years ago

It’s not RISC-V ‘gunning’ for RPi, it’s certain SBC manufacturers who think that a RISC-V board will enable them to compete with RPi.

It may, but the success of these boards will largely depend on other factors. RPi has succeeded because of their clear focus and really strong execution.

It will probably disappoint many but having a CPU with an open ISA isn’t going to be an overriding factor in determining whether any particular SBC succeeds in the market.

worik2• 4 years ago

If they can make it available they will be doing well.

I cannot find any Raspberry Pis for sale anywhere I can buy one.

musingsole• 4 years ago

From where I'm at, Raspberry Pis are plenty available, just selling for 30-40% more than they might have a couple years ago.

flyinghamster• 4 years ago

They're rarely in stock even at Micro Center. I ended up dragging out an Asus Tinkerboard, languishing in a drawer, for a project. I was a lot happier with it after I ditched the "Tinker OS" image in favor of Armbian.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

It's all about the peripherals. Make them not suck and document them well and you could have a chance. Follow ESP32's lead and you'll just be another also-ran.

RISC-V Guns for Raspberry Pi, Legacy Chips

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