I'm missing OpenGL!
BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
251–260 of 311 posts
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>* 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…
The fact that the congo is listed means that they're including the literal chattel slavery that's common in the mineral extraction process there.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#253Does anyone have informed opinion about the usability / value / relevance / quality of the Neural network support on this chip ? Their page mentions spec with : • SiFive U74 RISC-V Dual core with 2MB L2 cache @ 1.5GHz • Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision • NVDLA Engine (configuration 2048 MACs@800MHz ) • Neural Network Engine (1024MACs@500MHz) So this board seems to have some great support for neural net /…
I suspect an NVIDIA Jetson would be a better choice for this kind of application.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#254Does anyone have informed opinion about the usability / value / relevance / quality of the Neural network support on this chip ? Their page mentions spec with : • SiFive U74 RISC-V Dual core with 2MB L2 cache @ 1.5GHz • Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision • NVDLA Engine (configuration 2048 MACs@800MHz ) • Neural Network Engine (1024MACs@500MHz) So this board seems to have some great support for neural net /…
If it has driver/firmware blobs, I'll say no thanks and stick to my ARM Rockchips. If they deliver this on linux with full source code, I will definitely buy their boards.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#255I'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…
Robert C. Nelson has been doing a stellar job of maintaining the omap-image-builder repo: https://github.com/RobertCNelson/omap-image-builder (and https://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu ) It's pretty easy to use to build an image for Debian Buster/Stretch or Ubuntu Bionic Beaver, he has various configurations that cover IoT, console only/headless, GUI and a few other combos. It's pretty easy to create your own config w…
Robert is the best. Looks like he'll be involved with this project too.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
As long as you've got the target toolchain on the host, the code has no idea it's being cross compiled. If you've got the tooling set up it's a lot of setting of envars. It's not trivial but it's also not super difficult. A compiler running native on an architecture doesn't produce any different output than the same compiler doing a cross compilation. Even if you wanted to run a native RISC-V build process, running i…
The older HiFive Unleashed (1.5 GHz single-issue) builds things considerably faster on a per-core basis than qemu-system on current amd64 (or at least did in the Skylake generation). The dual-issue cores in the HiFive Unmatched should be around 50% faster. amd64 machines do have the advantage that you can get them with 32 or 64 cores and hundreds of GB of RAM -- at a price, especially in power consumption. The three…
That's running qemu which is unnecessary for cross compiling. I'm not seeing any advantage to building on native silicon rather than cross compiling on existing machines AMD64 machines. Even with the power usage of the AMD64 chips being higher, the faster compilation speed will likely net less overall energy used for the builds.
I fully understand wanting native silicon to do development on and to work on some architecture specific branch. It's easy to just recompile your working copy locally. The original poster was talking about "build machines". I'm not seeing the utility as "build machines", especially if they have far less power than AMD64 machines.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure the Fedora builds aren't designed for cross compilation (which is far from trivial for most packages not designed for it). Also, man-power is the most precious resource so it would be a waste to spend time trying to cross-compile what could be built natively.
As long as you've got the target toolchain on the host, the code has no idea it's being cross compiled. If you've got the tooling set up it's a lot of setting of envars. It's not trivial but it's also not super difficult. A compiler running native on an architecture doesn't produce any different output than the same compiler doing a cross compilation. Even if you wanted to run a native RISC-V build process, running i…
Only for very simple systems. Many are complicated which produce artifacts that are executed to produce other artifacts (which are also compiled). As arbitrary binaries are executed during the build, and the correctness may depend on native execution, this is far from as trivial as you might think. Have you ever compiled Emacs (at least in its 18 version)?
Building under QEMU is obvious, however the native hardware is actually faster.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#258Is 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…
My pet peeve about all these small single board computers is that none of them have multiple ethernet ports, which severely limits their usefulness as networking hardware. They'd otherwise be very well suited to being various kinds of packet routing appliances. You can sometimes hang a usb ethernet dongle off them but performance on those tend to be somewhat limited.
Check out solidrun, they have a variety of boards with multiple Ethernet ports.
I used to wonder why embedded boards didn’t have multiple Ethernet boards and why it’s not common to use ethernet to connect to peripherals instead of “old interfaces”. Until I tried it for a project. It turns out Ethernet uses roughly 0.5 to 2W per port depending on speed (that’s 1-4W per connection).
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#259Earlier 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.
The existence of Raspberry Pi as it is, Raspberry Pi 4 in parricular, is is a huge leap forward for the humanity already. The next leap is going to be the same kind of board but with no connectors besides an increasing number of full Thunderbolt 4 ports letting you connect anything you can imagine (incl as many GPIO connectors as you need). There is no need in a zoo of connectors like M.2, U.2, SATA, HDMI etc when we can conduct PCIe, DisplayPort and USB over a unified standard wire.
Re: BeagleV – An affordable RISC-V computer designed to run Linux
#260Is 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…
My pet peeve about all these small single board computers is that none of them have multiple ethernet ports, which severely limits their usefulness as networking hardware. They'd otherwise be very well suited to being various kinds of packet routing appliances. You can sometimes hang a usb ethernet dongle off them but performance on those tend to be somewhat limited.
Perhaps what you want is a range of boards with many combinations of features. Some with 4xethernet, some with 2xethernet, some with PCIE and 1xethernet, some with M.2 and PCIE, some with M.2 and 2xethernet, etc. to fill out that big matrix of combinations. But is the market big enough for such a huge range to be economical?
Some of them have PCIE which you could connect a network card to. That seems like a more practical way to allow flexibility than having a lot of special purpose boards.