171–180 of 311 posts
Is the SiFive U74 open source? I know the RISC-V ISA is, but I thought the SiFive designs were proprietary.
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.
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?
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>>* 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 fr…
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…
We have min wage in the US, and even that is not equal across all states - we do not have UBI or universal health care, we have shitty industries, such as insurance (forced hedge funds) and in general, we have brainwashing people to accept it as normal.
fuck that.
YC even wants you to think that all VC is all-truistic NOPE.
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…
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.
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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.
But if you vouch for it I'll take a closer look.
> 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.
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…
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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.
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.
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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.
Why would you want use these as build machines? It seems more efficient to just cross-compile on your fastest build machines. You get much faster CI feedback that way. Obviously you want to validate RISC-V code on native devices but using them as builders seems wasteful. I'm genuinely curious why that's desirable. Maybe I just misunderstand your comment and you want the RISC-V boards for validation i.e. make sure you…
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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 doe…
I don't really want audio. What I'm looking for is to read 3.3V or 5V analog levels, with really low frequency, once a second or less would be fine.