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

Post by justaj » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 12:25 AM UTC

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #148

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…

Imagination GPU :( Notorious for being hard to support in open source. I'm not even sure there was a single free driver for those. That likely means those devices are going to be stuck on an outdated kernel, unless Imagination steps in and provides ongoing binary support for newer kernels for their GPUs like x86 GPU manufacturers do. However, this being RISC-V with 2 existing devices total, I don't count on it. So cl…

Post by pabs3 » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 2:17 AM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #233

stragies wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally. Having reverse engineered a bit of the drivers, I think it's because they culturally think that all of their value add is in the software. Patents have expired on the TBDR fixed function hardware blocks. The rest is just a combo of a little RISC core that does job dispatch (Programmable Data Sequencer in their parlance), and a cluster of SMT barrel scheduled cores (used to be called USSE in the SGX days, not…

Post by qwerty456127 » Fri, Jan 15, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #292

qwerty456127 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's value in having GPIO pins not behind any bus or controller at all. Don't Thunderbolt controllers need firmware uploaded and such before they start working? How complex is Thunderbolt device and bus enumeration?

Post by paulcarroty » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 9:20 AM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #285

paulcarroty wrote: post #278

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NUCs costs much more than Pi, even used.

It costs more upfront, but it's worth it because I don't have to spend my time investigating why it's not working. Also, when comparing costs you should take into account things like enclosure, power supply, as card(s) etc. I'd say I probably paid around $250 or so for the NUC and a SODIMM and I had a SATA boot disk already. I had previously owned ODROID, libre computer (le potato), and Pi(s). These were probably in…

Post by wipt » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 4:03 PM UTC

vhodges wrote: post #153

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...