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Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

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Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#131

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #130
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the fab companies like TSMC/Samsung/GF/Intel are missing an opportunity here. Commoditize your complement: https://gwern.net/complement Publish the software that does this for free so that more customers come to you instead of using FPGAs or just not making the attempt. Make it easier to design new chips so that more people do it and you get more customers.

When it comes to hardware, the OSS model stops making economic sense. People have tried, but helping other competitors for free rapidly decays the market. =3 Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.

The point isn't to help your competitors, it's to help your customers. Qualcomm or Apple doesn't have the incentive to help their competitors design chips, but TSMC or Samsung does have the incentive to help Qualcomm's competitors design chips, because then there are more companies making chips and the fab gets more business and prevents any one of their customers from getting too much leverage over them.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#132

Post by numpad0 »

CapricornNoble wrote: post #121
numpad0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully Adafruit or someone could get these[1] out of "Contact Us" jail. 16GB 30TOPS BF16 in M.2 2280 at $369. PCIe 2x8 low profile "Duo" configuration available at $799. Supposedly. I believe the theoretical performance is Strix territory if these could be clustered, but only if they mass manufacture these. 1: https://www.edgecortix.com/en/hardware

Heh, interesting you call this "Contact Us Jail". I met sales and engineering staff from EdgeCortix at DSEI Japan 2025, and was very enthusiastic to pick up some of their products as alternatives to the Hailo-8L RPi cards. So far....nothing. Not even an ETA on when they will be shipping hardware.

DSEI! I wish I had some official reasons that I'd be obligated to go and have fun in events like that :p

My fear is that they could be in endemic Japanese death spiral disease of hand-wavingly waiting for massive orders while not doing much to secure one.

There are so many cool stuffs and perfect plans from Japanese large companies and government agencies that are pushed forward up to one step before volume production or commercial rollout and then stalled until funding dries up and everyone moves on. Which, if I were to explain by speculating, might be due to people prioritizing own job security over corporate revenues, due to low psychological safety and perceived invincibility of large organizations, as one among many consequences of employment ice age phenomenon.

But whatever the mechanism is, it'll be sad if this one follows that path. Hopefully they make and ship them in substantial numbers. That should be their goal anyway.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#133

Post by brucehoult »

RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #80
antonkochubey wrote: post #47

Ubuntu will not support RISC-V CPUs without RVA23 support going further, so this is stuck on 24.04 forever. There is no official Debian image either, and the Ubuntu version uses fixed kernel 6.6.47 with no further updates (it is not even installed from a repo). I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase.

Kinda tricky. Last time this came up, the consensus was that approximately nothing commercially available supported RVA23 at the time.

No. EXACTLY nothing. The RVA23 spec was ratified 11 months ago, today. There is zero reason to expect commercially available hardware in that time.

However there should be next year, and quite likely a couple of different choices by the time Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is officially released.

Waiting until 28.04 for RVA23-optimised code would be far too late.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#134

Post by brucehoult »

Aurornis wrote: post #75
leoedin wrote: post #67

The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these? The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer. If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x8…

You don’t need that many customers to design and ship an SBC. The hobbyist market is enough to sustain these companies. They can sell accessories to increase their margins. Their contract manufacturer can incrementally build batches of the boards. Many of these boards serve as development boards for the parts they include. If you want a dev board to try this part or you need a cheap RISC-V system to test RISC-V thing…

> You don’t need that many customers to design and ship an SBC.

Right. An SoC takes five years and tens of millions of dollars.

An SBC using that SoC can be designed and made in three months for the cost of a small team's salary -- possibly even just one person e.g. see Paul Stoffregen of Teensy fame, or Jonathan Oxer at Freetronics. I'll bet the teams at Sipeed, Banana Pi, Orange Pi etc are pretty small too.

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#135

Post by Joel_Mckay »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #131
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to hardware, the OSS model stops making economic sense. People have tried, but helping other competitors for free rapidly decays the market. =3 Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.

The point isn't to help your competitors, it's to help your customers. Qualcomm or Apple doesn't have the incentive to help their competitors design chips, but TSMC or Samsung does have the incentive to help Qualcomm's competitors design chips, because then there are more companies making chips and the fab gets more business and prevents any one of their customers from getting too much leverage over them.

Samsung actually had a technological lead in many areas, and it translated into real revenue. They are a business, and exist to provide utility to consumers in exchange for investor profit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCWDzWG1BcI

Many incentives to push technology forwards are high-risk/expensive investments, and expecting the public/customers to willingly help pay that cost is naive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cru2bkqwSYk

I assure you academic funding does not cover such large costs, government grants are only a fraction of expected taxes in late stage Technology Readiness Levels, and competitor/cloner fractured markets erode fiscal returns needed to pay for the total incurred project cost.

Apple makes minimal utility products, but relies on intangible branding to maintain perceived value. Thus, only Apple could get away with selling zero chip designer handbags, and would still make absurd revenue (not a real product yet.) Steve Jobs observed very early, that selling raw motherboards was a low margin business. Which it was why the company shifted into consumer products.

For almost every other brand, consumers have shown they prefer the near material cost in opportunistic China/India factories, and thus simply ignore most firms products that include 10 years of R&D costs to pay back the investors.

There are many shelved technologies that will never see a Patent or the public markets. This is because the conditions are not ready for advanced products yet, and competitors irrationally nurture the lowest value volume market sectors. Thus, everyone gets a 15% value boost at regular intervals, and people remain excited about 3 decade old technology.

Qualcomm cellular chip product lines essentially lived off iPhone sales. Like any loyal dog, they will unlikely bite the hand that feeds them...

Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.

Have a wonderful day =3

Re: Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projects

#136

Post by DoctorOetker »

slaw wrote: post #118
DoctorOetker wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the only amazon distributor as far as I know. they were directly linked from the Orange Pi 5 website. Its their responsibility they direct their customers to dubious distribution systems (IF THAT IS THE CASE). We should never reward orders or preorders in any fast devaluating area (like electronics) to be reneged after inflation: this would allow manufacturers to post-select a financial path: if less inflation…

Orange Pi website shows for me only US Amazon Store. You should get your funds back from Amazon and order on Aliexpress.

Thats probably because of your IP address?

Also strangely, I am unable to load the https version of www.orangepi.org even though it was available in the past:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CKVPWJVL?ref=myi_title_dp

I also just discovered the dropshipping policy (and necessary requirements and forbidden practices).

Either they had an agreement with Orange Pi or they didn't. Either way this gives leverage to ensure my order gets fulfilled.

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