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

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

#191

Post by IshKebab »

hajile wrote: post #92
IshKebab wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to ARM, nothing significant. They're very similar load-store architectures. Here's a RISC-V quick reference: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1617/ECAD+Arch/files/docs/... And ARM: http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~valvano/Volume1/QuickReferenceC... The main difference is that RISC-V is a lot more modular, so it's going to be difficult to distribute binaries for but more flexible if you're doing something comple…

> The main difference is that RISC-V is a lot more modular, so it's going to be difficult to distribute binaries for but more flexible if you're doing something completely vertical. Also a lot of the modules have bundle relatively common/easy instructions with niche/difficult ones. E.g. multiply with divide. I don't think it'll be worse than ARM and it's decidedly better than x86. There are SEVEN major revisions of A…

> leaves you still checking for support for: SSE3, SSE4...

Find me a processor that supports SSE4 but not SSE3. That's the problem. With x86 you pretty much can say "we're targeting processors made after 2010" or whatever and that's that. You make one binary and it works.

RISC-V allows a combinatorial explosion of possible CPUs. You can have a CPU that supports extension X and not Y, but another one that supports Y and not X.

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

#192

Post by blkbjhjkl »

cogman10 wrote: post #120
qwerty456127 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly I just wish there was a faster standard than SD. 100MB/s for solid state is just incredibly slow now-a-days. There's no reason you couldn't kick SD transfer speeds up towards SSD speeds other than the protocol doesn't allow for it.

I wish folks would stop conflating boot media and root media. There's no reason your SD card has to consist of anything more than u-boot.

SD is fantastically simple, so that the boot rom can get at a bootloader without much effort (generally the bootrom just looks at a memory offset on the mmc device). Once you start speaking newer faster protocols, this simplicity is lost. You're not likely going to find a bootrom that implements all the bits needed to get u-boot from a sata device.

In a perfect world, once these are no longer developer devices, the mmc would be replaced with some spi flash (or even an emmc) with just u-boot.

On 90% of embedded dev systems, you're better off thinking of the sd card as a "bios chip" then a hard drive. The fact you can also use it as a block device to store a rw filesystem is almost incidental, and should probably be avoided.

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

#193

Post by megous »

cjbconnor wrote: post #69
lsb wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get an SD card with 0.5TB capacity on it for USD$30, what storage needs do you foresee? Also these tend to be used where weight is an issue, so, why do you want to lug around a huge disk?

Nearly all SD cards that I've used in Pis and other SBCs have died unpredictably in the past, so I've pretty much given up on using them

Using f2fs and setting up the SW on my SBCs to not write data needlessly to SD card all the time (some programs are really bad at this), and having a very high quality power supply and cabling was enough to make my boards work for years on a single SD card. Some are at 4 years currently and still work fine. I'm using Sandisk only, since a few years ago, because it's the only manufacturer that allows me to verify online whether the card I bought is genuine and provides A1 rated cards at the same time. Experience with about 20 boards.

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

#194

Post by ansible »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #122
drewm1980 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mill has been in development for... 18 ~years now! Soon they will be able to hire engineers who are actually younger than the company. I wonder if there has ever been a tech company that survived so long without bringing a product to market. Duke Nukem Forever took ~14 years.

Their product is hardware patents.

I would be happy if they just released a instruction-level simulator to play around with.

It would also be super-nice if they released at least a Copper or Tin core (low-end) that can be synthesized to an FPGA for people to try out.

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

#195

Post by tyingq »

blihp wrote: post #152
sradman wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To me, they seem to serve different markets. The various BeagleBoards have more industrial specs like a wider operating temperature range, on-board EMMC, etc. Also, the pair of PRU's make them useful for things where more precise timing is important.

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

#196

Post by tjoff »

bsder wrote: post #181
tjoff wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have the same ecosystem. Which is half the point of the rpi to start with. But if you vouch for it I'll take a closer look.

> It doesn't have the same ecosystem. Which is half the point of the rpi to start with. Now that's a valid argument. And I would argue it's way more than half. If you want a one-off mumblesomething and can stay at the Linux OS level (ie. Web application, USB peripherals or maybe the most basic of GPIOs), the RPi ecosystem is going to let you get there much faster even though it will crash and burn occasionally. If th…

I'll take your word for it, but it sounds like a very different use-case than most use the pis for though.

When you spend that much time with your device cost isn't a factor (imho). But the pi is cheap enough that I can gift one if I know the end result will work well. And it is quite nice to just have one lying around for when you get an itch.

Using netboot I have never had an issue with the pi. All reliability problems I've experienced can be tracked down bad power and SD-cards (note: I have not used any IO other than USB). Both are annoying enough to look for alternatives but both are also fixable (netbooting likely disqualifies it for many usecases though).

Minimizing reads on the sd card usually means that they work at least several years untouched (in my experience, obviously limited sample size), which is likely good enough for many (a true read-only system might work even better). But when the audio streamer in the vacation cabin dies when you aren't around to fix it is still frustrating. So I'm in the moment of figuring out how to move the last of them to be netbooted. Which has some very nice side-effects as well, such as trivial remote system backup+restores.

It also comes down to time. I know the pi and the pitfalls. Researching an alternative would take many hours and I'd still have to experience some of them. If the goal of the project isn't to learn a new sbc then that alone is a dealbreaker.

That said, PocketBeagle seems to support wifi netboot (which neither the pi and pi zero w do). Might be able to find a project for that!

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

#198

Post by Youden »

qchris wrote: post #155
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.

I'm curious, what do you do with so many PWM outputs?

I just play with electronics for side projects but stick to digital for everything, so I'm wondering what I'm missing out on.

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

#199

Post by acehreli »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #122
drewm1980 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mill has been in development for... 18 ~years now! Soon they will be able to hire engineers who are actually younger than the company. I wonder if there has ever been a tech company that survived so long without bringing a product to market. Duke Nukem Forever took ~14 years.

Their product is hardware patents.

That's patently wrong. :) I worked for the Mill for a while The Mill is as real as it gets. EDIT: No, there is no actual CPU but the software, the compiler, the simulator, etc. exist.

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

#200

Post by greyhair »

bsder wrote: post #162
hajile wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Black compared with the older RPi3. And everybody was always "The RPi3 is cheaper". The conversations always went like this: "Cheaper? So, did you count the SD card you need for the RPi?" "But it's cheaper." "And the special power supply because the RPi power systems suck?" "But it's cheaper." "And the keyboard and monitor because it doesn't run headless over USB?" "But it's cheaper." "... Okay, boss, it's cheape…

Two different targets, I have used both. I have so many 5V power supplies sitting around, they git in the way. Including 12v/5v buck converters for auto stuff. You can configure for headless when you set up the SD card before you ever boot. I have never booted a Pi with attached display/keyboard.

The Pi is cheap, for a reason, but it is still more powerful than anything I use it for. But the same goes for the Beagle Board.

Choose the board you want, for the project you are doing.

Note: For every RPi project I have done, I have done two or three ESP8266/ESP32 projects along with five or six AVR/M0/M2 Arduino projects.

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