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Hardware IT Linux

BeagleV is a $150 RISC-V Computer Designed To Run Linux (arstechnica.com) 52

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
New submitter shoor writes: Seeed Studios -- the makers of the Odyssey mini-PC -- have teamed up with well-known SBC vendor BeagleBoard to produce an affordable RISC-V system designed to run Linux. The new BeagleV (pronounced "Beagle Five") system features a dual-core, 1GHz RISC-V CPU made by StarFive -- one of a network of RISC-V startups created by better-known RISC-V vendor SiFive. The CPU is based on two of SiFive's U74 Standard Cores -- and unlike simpler microcontroller-only designs, it features a MMU and all the other trimmings necessary to run full-fledged modern operating systems such as Linux distributions. StarFive's VIC7100 processor design is aimed at edge AI tasks as well as general-purpose computing. In addition to the two RISC-V CPU cores, it features a Tensilica Vision VP6 DSP for machine-vision applications, a Neural Network Engine, and a single-core NVDLA (Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator) engine.
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BeagleV is a $150 RISC-V Computer Designed To Run Linux More

BeagleV is a $150 RISC-V Computer Designed To Run Linux

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  • About time (Score:3)

    by flatulus ( 260854 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @03:53PM (#60939512)
    Yes! It's about time. Hooray. Now it gets interesting.

    • It's still pretty pricey. If I want to play with some internet-connect gadget I can justify $40-50 on an ARM-based board, but paying $150 for more or less the same thing just because it says RISC-V on the label really isn't doing it for me.

      And before everyone jumps in with "but look at all the extras!", I don't need fuzzy dice and chrome tailfins and whitewall tires, I just want a cheap, power-efficient embedded computing thing with good tool support. While this is the first affordable RISC-V board that

    • Yes! It's about time. Hooray. Now it gets interesting.

      How is this better than a Raspberry Pi at 1/4 the price?

  • the venerable BeagleBone series. Excited for BeagleV should be interesting.

  • Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stikves ( 127823 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @04:13PM (#60939610) Homepage

    I was wondering why the price was not competitive with Raspberry PI 4, then I decided to dig deeper.

    The most similar Beagleboard option I found was this one:
    https://www.arrow.com/en/produ... [arrow.com] (BeagleBone AI). There is a nice comparison chart on Arrow site for their basic model (which is more like RPi).

    So basically:
    * Extra USB ports (4xUSB3 vs 2)
    * Extra camera input (2 vs 1)
    * AI co-processor
    * DSP co-processor

    were there. The other difference was RAM (and eMMC). This new board seems to offer 8GB, and that option on a RPi4 is $40 extra.

    When all added up $150 might make sense.

    • Re:Pricing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thereddaikon ( 5795246 ) on Wednesday January 13, 2021 @04:31PM (#60939676)

      I've seen a lot of people compare this to RBPi's today in various places and I'm not sure why. I mean I get it to a degree, its a small SBC with a RISC processor. But the RBPi is a finished product meant for makers to make things. This is a development board. Its purpose is to facilitate devs in better supporting the platform as a whole. The only "making" that's really intended here is making the toolchain. I'm sure you could repurpose this for RBPi style projects but that was never its purpose. And I'm also sure that eventually we will see something more in line with the RBPi using a RISCV cpu.

      • This is a development board. Its purpose is to facilitate devs in better supporting the platform as a whole.

        Yeah the dual core 1GHz chip would be a huge disappointment if you thought you were going to running... Anything on this.

      • While it's development board, it does have a GPIO header. So a lot of what you can do with a RasPi can be done with this, too.

        Plus the fact that the RasPi doesn't have the computer vision accelerator. Or the Neural Net accelerator. Or the Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator. A RasPi has to do all of those things in software.

        So, if you're doing something with a RasPi which entails computer vision or some kind of neural-net-based AI, you might want to spend the extra money for one of these.

        • Plus the fact that the RasPi doesn't have the computer vision accelerator. Or the Neural Net accelerator. Or the Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator. A RasPi has to do all of those things in software.

          So, if you're doing something with a RasPi which entails computer vision or some kind of neural-net-based AI, you might want to spend the extra money for one of these.

          If that's your thing then NVIDIA makes something far more powerful for less money:

          https://developer.nvidia.com/e... [nvidia.com]

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Besides which there are plenty of RPi-like boards out there, none of them very popular because they don't have the community and add-on support that the Pi does.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

          Besides which there are plenty of RPi-like boards out there, none of them very popular because they don't have the community and add-on support that the Pi does.

          That's the big question. RPi hangs around because of the community keeping it alive, the manufacturer keeps it alive and things remain compatible to an extent. I mean, I think the old RPi 1 and RPi 2 are still supported, as is the RPi 3 even though RPi 4 is out.

          The big question is - will this board be stuck with what it comes with or will the manufa

      • The BeagleBoard was always capable of a number of things the Pi wasn’t quite powerful enough for— software defined radio was one application that was interesting, along with being effectively a cross between an arduino and a phone in strange ways. I have gone through a few and really liked them. Their problem for me was reliability. At least three died in under two years of service.

      • I've seen a lot of people compare this to RBPi's today in various places and I'm not sure why. I mean I get it to a degree, its a small SBC with a RISC processor. But the RBPi is a finished product meant for makers to make things. This is a development board. Its purpose is to facilitate devs in better supporting the platform as a whole. The only "making" that's really intended here is making the toolchain. I'm sure you could repurpose this for RBPi style projects but that was never its purpose. And I'm also sure that eventually we will see something more in line with the RBPi using a RISCV cpu.

        "RBPi" also make compute modules.

        • They do but this RSICV board isn't a compute module either. Again, you could repurpose it for all of these tasks. General purpose computers are versatile like that but the product isn't intended for that use so the design isn't optimized for it and price isn't competitive for those markets.

    • The point of a SBC is to be an easy amd cheap starting point for hacking up.something, education, etc.

      By adding kitchen sinks that should have been officia ladd-ons, they overpriced it for the target group.
      I can buy a cheap Ryzen system for that price!!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      The Raspberry Pi uses a shared USB bus for its network and SD Card connections which is less than ideal even in the best circumstances.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I paid about $40 for a smaller RISC-V board that can't run Linux, but has the AI functions.

        ARM dev boards with a similar DSP from Tensilica are around $130.

        Interesting is that the DSP is for vision, but the AI core can also do realtime vision processing. Or 8 microphone 3d location, etc. This is a seriously powerful dev board. All of that runs in parallel to the RISC-V core that runs the OS.

    • Don't underestimate the value of the TI Sitara compared to whatever closed crap the RPi has.

      I can use GCC, I can use all the TI DriverLib stuff (BSD-style license) without an OS, or with FreeRTOS, or the ARM CMSIS libraries. It is all well documented. You can get free support from US-based TI engineers on the forums.

      And I can buy Sitara ICs starting at $6 (at quantity) from US distributors like Mouser, no contract or weird stuff needed.

      So I don't care if I pay two or three times as much for a dev board.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hattig ( 47930 )

      Wait until September and this board will be upgraded with a quad-core A74 and Imagination GPU at the same price.

      (to me it sounds like the first revision of the SoC they are using had some issues resulting in disabled CPU cores and GPU, and they will fix it in a new stepping - evidence is that the first edition still has HDMI 1080p30 output, and various video decode/encode features, and likely display framebuffer support (display/media are separate components to the 3D GPU aspect).

  • I'm tempted to get one just to help RISC-V get a running start.

    • Me too, would love to see another ISA. I've had good luck with beagle bone arm's in the past, so reputable supplier in my view.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hattig ( 47930 )

      I'll get the revision 2 later this year I think, if it does have quad-core and a working GPU (Imagination, but likely small and low end of course).

  • Beagle V (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Arthur, KBE ( 6444066 )
    Didn't that crash and burn on Mars?

  • I wish more of these dev boards had sata on board. It would allow people to experiment with what the can do when significantly more storage is available to them.

    I have an old arm based UDOO board that had a Sata port. I recently swapped it in for an old home file server mother board and now save a ton of electrical

    I know you could go USB to Sata converter, but then you are basically just putting another CPU in the chain, needlessly increasing power, cost and latency.

    • Wouldn't M.2 be a better fit?

      • M.2 would be great, but there are not many M.2 optical drives - for example. A standard SATA connector is smaller then an M.2 connector and would add almost nothing to the cost of the board. In many ways an M.2 connector is more desirable and I would opt for one in favour of eMMC, but standard SATA would have more potential uses while costing less to implement. That is assuming they bake a SATA controller into the SOC.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hattig ( 47930 )

      M2 would be better, on the underside of the board, as long as case designs allow for this additional height.

      Working USB boot is also fine in my book, the USB-SATA controller is very low power and task-specific. However cases (from the Pi ecosystem) don't usually allow space for the drive, and there's the USB cable routing issue. A USB header on the board for integrated solutions would be nice for this.

      This board is slightly larger than a Pi, and a different arrangement, so it'll need custom cases.

    • a ton of electrical

      E=mc^2
      calculating
      calculating
      20 TWh
      Wow, that's a lot of electrical!

  • Question about MCU capabilities (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ARM cpus come in a lot of flavors, and some are more suited to microcontroller tasks, because they have sram from which to execute code as to not incur wait states, and the clock rate isn't throttled for temperature nor dithered for EMI compatibility.
    Basically, are there any RISC-V controllers that are equally suited to microcontroller tasks?

  • Say, in units of RPi4, or of Ryzen 4300GE.

    In typical work loads, if such a thing makes sense.

    E.g. can you compile.the software on the system or do you have to cross-compile on a full PC because it takes too long? (> 1h for the packages in a typical weekly update of a source distribution.)

    • E.g. can you compile.the software on the system or do you have to cross-compile on a full PC because it takes too long?

      8 gigs of RAM is sufficient for most compile jobs. Even large projects should not cause any problems - at least I have had no problems with the 8G version of the Pi 4. You do want to limit the number of concurrent jobs - but with only 2 cores that should not limit the speed. Many desktop compile jobs use significantly more memory but that is only because they are taking advantage of the large number of cores available. If you are just compiling a Linux distro then no problem - assuming you have the tim

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hattig ( 47930 )

      I wouldn't expect wonders from the U74 core, but it's not too bad.

      https://www.sifive.com/cores/u... [sifive.com]

      4.27/2.5 DMIPS/MHz (Best Effort/Legal)
      5.1 CoreMark/MHz

      I believe an ARM Cortex A53 gets around 2.6 CoreMark/MHz but today my Google-fu is broken.

  • I want an open architecture that competes with ARM and x86 as badly as the next guy, BUT .. this thing is priced too high or performs too low.

    They have to offer a value for money other than "buy this so RISC V can succeed."

    They need to either be priced lower than a Raspberry Pi or provide more 4x more value than it's priced at. That is, this $150 must provide more value than what you can get with x86 or ARM for $600.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • The Pi doesn't come with an AI chip or a DSP.

        Doesnt the Pi Computer Module 4 come with hardware video decode and a GPU with full OpenGL ES 3.0 support?

        Looks like "DSP" and "AI" chips to me.

    • For $200 you can get industrial pc with intel low power 4 core and even more comms and interfaces like sata This Dev type board is probably really for people prototyping future embedded devices that have to do image processing, like say a security camera.

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