At some point some RISC-V researchers tried to put GPU instructions in CPU. It seems no RISC-V implementation uses it.
$70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
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Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#22Direct link to the product page on Pine64.com: https://pine64.com/product/star64-model-a-8gb-single-board-c...
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#23RISC, ARM, whatever, just give me more cores and memory (ECC please!), maybe even better NICs, and keep it sub $300. AMD Ryzen is a really solid platform right now that's hard to beat with a cluster of 4GB SoCs.
Some of us, one of us at least, love the cheap toys
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#24I love that RISC-V is starting to take off!
I'm curious about standardization of the rest of the system - the way x86 operating systems more or less work on any x86 machine, whereas ARM seems to basically require a device-specific OS image for every single device. Is there any work going into addressing that and making RISK-V more like x86 and less like ARM systems?
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#25So this is the same SoC as the Vision Five 2?
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#26Can someone explain what all the fuss around RISC-V is about?
For CPU developers it's permissionless. To develop a new Arm chip you need to negotiate a license up front from that company. To develop a new x86 chip, well, forget about that. Intel won't license x86 for any amount of money. For RISC-V, download a BSD-licensed core from github, or grab the BSD-licensed specs and write your own. No need to ask anyone's permission, and no fees to pay.
But since AMD owns amd64, can't you get a license from them?
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#27While looking for the successor to Raspberry Pi's, my interest revolves around how open source the drivers are and whether they're upstreamed or not. I have no interesting in a board, no matter how cheap, that will be stuck on some ancient, unmaintained kernel version. It looks like they're off to a good start but appearances can be deceiving. Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty n…
> Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty new so I wouldn't expect it in mainline.
Yeah, it's at an awkward point right now where you wouldn't expect to have drivers upstream, so it's harder to predict whether it will get where we want it.
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#28Can someone explain what all the fuss around RISC-V is about?
People get excited because "it's open source". Except it's really not as only the instruction set is "open source" and even that doesn't really mean much as interfaces have dubious copyright protection. Still, it promises a cheaper alternative to ARM because of the theoretical reduced licensing costs from the trademark name. The other salient is political: ARM, x86, etc are Western aligned while RISC-V is attractivel…
> because "it's open source". Except it's really not as only the instruction set is "open source"
There are multiple cores available under permissive licenses all the way through to ASIC or FPGA implementation. There is also quite a bit of academic research happening now, which may not be formally open source but is shared and published.
> even that doesn't really mean much as interfaces have dubious copyright protection
There's a big difference between "given a license to use this" and "might not get sued, or at least might win if we do, if we use this without permission."
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#29While looking for the successor to Raspberry Pi's, my interest revolves around how open source the drivers are and whether they're upstreamed or not. I have no interesting in a board, no matter how cheap, that will be stuck on some ancient, unmaintained kernel version. It looks like they're off to a good start but appearances can be deceiving. Kernel is a fork and who knows if it's missing anything. It's all pretty n…
how much work/how long will it take before the kernel is not a fork/everything is upstreamed. 12 months?
also, on my raspberry pi i at least stood a chance of running a headless chrome for some silly scrape job i had. RISC-V pretty much guarantees that's not the case, right?
Re: $70 RISC-V Computer from Pine64 Goes on Sale April 4 – OMG Linux
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
For CPU developers it's permissionless. To develop a new Arm chip you need to negotiate a license up front from that company. To develop a new x86 chip, well, forget about that. Intel won't license x86 for any amount of money. For RISC-V, download a BSD-licensed core from github, or grab the BSD-licensed specs and write your own. No need to ask anyone's permission, and no fees to pay.
But since AMD owns amd64, can't you get a license from them?
Somehow I doubt that they're much more friendly about it. At a technical level, though it's an interesting question; I'm actually pretty curious to know whether you could make a processor that's pure amd64 without the legacy 32-bit mode... I suspect it would be a fair bit of work from the software side to support that, but it's probably possible. But I'm no ISA designer:)
Edit: Or is 32-bit x86 so old that you could "just" clone it because all the patents have expired?