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PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

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Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#61

Post by Alupis »

ekianjo wrote: post #51
OJFord wrote: post #11

I honestly didn't realise the Raspberry Pi isn't open source. Why isn't it? The Foundation's charitable objective is education, so sure, it's not necessary , but there really seems to be no reason for it to be closed - I suppose it's just 'closed by default'?

Broadcom SoC is probably protected by a bunch of patents and/or trade secrets, which makes it impractical to open source. For example the whole boot process is a black box, which is why you have to use Raspbian and not regular Debian.

That's not really true anymore.

Device Tree and other things help with this, although you do still require certain BLOB's to access the GPU and other features.

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#62

Post by monocasa »

stefan_ wrote: post #29
monocasa wrote: post #3

Oof, GPU by Imagination Technologies. Here's hoping their close brush with death opened them to the idea of open sourcing their code.

They managed to pick the one mobile GPU vendor that has zero open-source drivers for their chips and a reputation for horribly messy and unstable proprietary code. Another board for the landfill, forever doomed to some 80s throwback Unix timeshare shell application.

In IMG's defense, the way that their drivers and firmware are micro optimized for the specific IP core version and use case by the host software was one of their competitive advantages. It's one of the reasons why their cores were some of the fastest and most efficient for the years that they still had plenty of capital rolling in to support that model.

You'd expect that kind of thing to be brittle when you don't have source access, but the drivers themselves were remarkably clean when I spent some time reversing them. It's just a shame that they're so afraid of open source too, because the above really compounds that pain.

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#63

Post by vhodges »

ansible wrote: post #33
bfuclusion wrote: post #4

Sweet. I'll monitor this an order a non-gpu version when it comes out. Most of my stuff just needs a serial console.

Hilariously, on one of the slides posted to Twitter, the phase 1 chip won't have low-speed peripherals. But I'm sure they'll include at least one serial port. No one is going to get very far without even a serial console. The phase 1 SoC is all I'm interested in for now. The lowest-size LPDDR4 part I could find is 256MB, which isn't a lot, but enough for what I want to do. Having that RAM, and networking or USB, will…

'Only' 128MB but https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/good-stuff-department/pr... is capable of running a linux capable core and it's tiny (Adafruit's Feather form factor)

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#64

Post by monocasa »

byset wrote: post #32

Interesting that the group behind this is Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, which is sponsored by UC Berkeley as well as a major Chinese university and the Shenzhen government. China is quite interested in RISC-V gaining traction as trade and security barriers rise and they work to build up their domestic technology sector. Going into wild-ass speculation mode, if this board really is affordable, I wonder if it's…

Do we know the foundry?

I like your idea because I could see the Chinese government doing this to help prop up SMIC too. The RPi4 isn't any smaller than 16nm, and SMIC needs 14nm customers.

Shoot for the 500MHz target listed, which is achievable with Victorian era style over engineering. Next sell those more or less at cost after the government footed the bill for initial capital (probably paying back .gov.cn first). Then using the massive body of software you expect from the new ecosystem around the first wave of chips to reoptimize the cores and inch your way towards really competitive chips. All the while SMIC gets great experience at their lower node with a pretty low risk, but high volume project.

Total speculation, but fun speculation. If someone pulls that off they probably win the whole Made in China 2025 thing for homegrown computers in an interesting enough niche to have a foreign audience too.

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#65

Post by xigency »

ColanR wrote: post #2

Promising hardware, though this isn't looking like comparable hardware even to the Raspberry Pi Zero. Only has a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) processor at 500+ MHz. RAM size not specified. If it was priced in the $5-15 range it would be more or less practical, but higher than that I'd be buying it solely for the architecture novelty.

The Arduino Uno retails for around $30 and gives you a 16MHz CPU and 2KB of RAM so I don’t think specs and price are that related, especially when looking at different architectures.

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#66

Post by incompatible »

monocasa wrote: post #3

Oof, GPU by Imagination Technologies. Here's hoping their close brush with death opened them to the idea of open sourcing their code.

"but the memory PHY, USB 3.0 PHY, GPU, and other I/Os will still be closed source"

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#67

Post by kinghajj »

drmpeg wrote: post #43
ColanR wrote: post #2

Promising hardware, though this isn't looking like comparable hardware even to the Raspberry Pi Zero. Only has a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) processor at 500+ MHz. RAM size not specified. If it was priced in the $5-15 range it would be more or less practical, but higher than that I'd be buying it solely for the architecture novelty.

I'm a little concerned that these RV64GC implementations all end up at about 500-600 MHz. There's plenty of 1.5 GHz ARM processors at 28 nm.

SonicBOOM, the latest of the Berkley Out-of-Order Machine from UC Berkley, was fabbed for running at 1 GHz.[0]

[0]: https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_15_Zhao....

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#68

Post by userbinator »

neilpanchal wrote: post #22
PedroBatista wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Foundation doesn't make the SoCs, Broadcom does.

Also, its not possible to write your own DSI/MIPI drivers for a phone LCD that you can buy on eBay, partly for not having the DSI/MIPI specification unless you pay upwards of thousands of dollars a year and Raspberry Pi doesn't allow access to the DSI/MIPI HAL layer - its part of the SOC which Broadcom controls. About the only way to make a device with an LCD is to use the built-in HDMI.

partly for not having the DSI/MIPI specification unless you pay upwards of thousands of dollars a year

There is a little thing called Google... ;-)

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#69

Post by [deleted] »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #34

Unfortunately not purely based on Free and Open Source software: > Exceptons (sic): foundry related IPs and high-speed commercial interface, but gradually reduce close source (sic) usage over time Wonder what the FSF will make of it. They've long lamented that Raspberry Pi depends on non-Free software. https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers

[deleted]

Re: PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board

#70

Post by monocasa »

snvzz wrote: post #40

Apparently they plan to include a PowerVR GPU on the second generation boards. That's not very OSHW if you ask me. I'd rather an unaccelerated framebuffer, or even no graphics at all. They don't seem to understand what kind of market there is for this sort of device. If I didn't care about this sort of thing, I would just grab one of the many proprietary-encumbered SBCs, any of which faster and cheaper than this boar…

FWIW, every chip I've seen with a PowerVR GPU uses a video scan out engine that's pretty much completely disconnected from the GPU.

That's one of the neat things about how programmable their cores are; you can resolve in the tile to just about any surface format since it's all done in software anyway, so it's really easy to integrate with other scan IP blocks.

TL;DR: You'll probably get a simple un-accelerated framebuffer (maybe with a few planes) with a PowerVR off to the side that you can just ignore if you want.

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