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BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

beaglev.seeed.cc

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Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#151

Post by artificialLimbs »

happimess wrote: post #59
mrweasel wrote: post #53

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…

I'm certainly no expert, but I've never been able to run a spinning disk HDD off of a raspberry pi without a powered USB hub. I imagine the thermals and form factor would be hurt pretty badly by including a plausible power supply.

Running a spinny 2.5" 1TB drive on my pi zerow using a Samsung rapid charger to power the pi.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#152

Post by blihp »

sradman wrote: post #67
basher wrote: post #13

Arstechnica coverage: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/seeed-and-beagleboar...

> 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 Rasp…

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.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#153

Post by vhodges »

mrweasel wrote: post #53

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…

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...

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#154

Post by hajile »

bsder wrote: post #141
tjoff wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most that are complaining about this just want something reliable. Raspberry pis are very popular as audio streamers, media centers that streams of the network, home automations etc. But all or them greatly suffer from the fact that it can randomly die on you. Which is quite frustrating. The only sensible solution (imho) to this currently is netbooting but it can be a hassle to setup in some cases. An integrated 16GB…

We have an alternative to the RPi that has an eMMC. It's called a Beaglebone. And everybody bitches that the board is too expensive.

A PI4 compute unit with 8GB of RAM instead of 1GB (faster, DDR4 instead of DDR3 too) and 32GB eMMC and a quad-core 64-bit CPU with much higher IPC while only costing $90 which is around $50 cheaper than a BeagleBoard AI (the same comparison exists for the Black too). You also get direct PCIe access to do what you want.

Beagle just doesn't offer anywhere near the same value.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#155

Post by qchris »

pedrocr wrote: post #105

> 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.

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.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#156

Post by swebs »

happimess wrote: post #59
mrweasel wrote: post #53

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…

I'm certainly no expert, but I've never been able to run a spinning disk HDD off of a raspberry pi without a powered USB hub. I imagine the thermals and form factor would be hurt pretty badly by including a plausible power supply.

The Rasperry Pi 4 can power an 2.5 HDD just fine.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#157

Post by tenebrisalietum »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #91
mrweasel wrote: post #53

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…

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 te…

SD cards are fragile.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#158

Post by blihp »

pjc50 wrote: post #107
tyingq wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

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.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#159

Post by stragies »

monocasa wrote: post #132
pabs3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

They've been delivering that vacuous promise every few years. Being bought by Canyon Bridge, a private equity fund owned by the Chinese government, a few years ago has unfortunately not changed anything.

Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux

#160

Post by edsouza »

mrweasel wrote: post #94
brucehoult wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

That's a little costly, but I guess development of a board like that isn't cheap.

The board has 16GB DDR4 memory on board, that's probably one of the most costly components.
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