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Open Source Hardware

Pine64 Is Working On a RISC-V Single-Board Computer (liliputing.com) 43

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
Open hardware company Pine64 says it's preparing to launch a single-board computer (SBC) that will be its most powerful RISC-V powered device yet. Liliputing reports: While Pine64 hasn't provided detailed specs yet (some are still being worked out), the company says that the upcoming SBC have a RISC-V chip that offers comparable performance to the Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor at the heart of Pine64's Quartz64 board.

The RISC-V board will be available with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and features support for USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and a PCIe slot. And while Pine64 hasn't revealed which RISC-V processor it's using yet, the company notes that that the chip features an Imagination Technologies BXE-2-32 GPU which is designed for "entry-level" and "mid-range" applications and for which Imagination plans to make source code available soon. Pine64 says the board will follow the "Model A" form factor, meaning it'll measure around 133 x 80 x 19mm (5.24" x 3.15" x 0.75"). That makes it a bit larger than a Raspberry Pi Model B, but the extra space means there's room for that PCIe slot and other I/O connectors.
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Pine64 Is Working On a RISC-V Single-Board Computer More

Pine64 Is Working On a RISC-V Single-Board Computer

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  • Hopefully, wifi will be standard unlike on the raspberry pi.

    • Not much point in wifi on a board that's not very fit for conversion into a mobile device. You'll likely have portables (Pine64 -> Pinebook, Pinetab, Pinephone; RockPro64 -> Pinebook Pro, Pinephone Pro), but here wired ethernet is faster and more reliable.

      • Why isn't it fit for a portable? If it's anything like the Quartz64 [pine64.com] it's got a battery charger etc. onboard to run from a Lithium battery (with temp sensing.)

      • You'll likely have portables (Pine64 -> Pinebook, Pinetab, Pinephone; RockPro64 -> Pinebook Pro, Pinephone Pro), but here wired ethernet is faster and more reliable.

        Wired ethernet? An RJ-45 jack on a cell phone? Are you trolling?

    • Hopefully, wifi will be standard unlike on the raspberry pi.

      Let's see: Pi Zero W, Pi Zero 2 W, Pico W, Pi 3, Pi 4, Pi 400 - all have built in WiFi.

      Which model are you thinking of that doesn't have WiFi standard? If you're thinking of the original Pico or Zero, then the newest versions have been updated for $2 more.

      • Re:Wifi (Score:5, Insightful)

        by narcc ( 412956 ) on Saturday July 02, 2022 @05:01AM (#62667710) Journal

        It doesn't matter how many years have passed, or how long the offense went unaddressed at the time, if a company does something a Slashdot user doesn't like, they will whine about it at every possible opportunity.

        BH poster: "Did they fix x yet?"

        Everyone else: "They fixed x like 10 years ago"

        ... two threads down ...

          BH poster: "Who cares about y? They can't even fix x!"

      • Which model are you thinking of that doesn't have WiFi standard?

        The earlier models, 1 and 2 don't have wifi and they're still in production. It's still a stupid complaint.

        • there's also the zero, but it's still a stupid complaint, because there's also a zero w

          It was quite irritating though the originals had no wifi but only 2 usb... and very, very bad usb. one or the other would be livable but both? ugh.

    • I hope not just because of the potentially compromised and backdoored status of the binary blobs of drivers for wifi NIC's.

      I'd love to have some computing that wasn't compromised from the get go.

  • They said it's RISC-V processor would be of similar speed to newer ARM device of their product line.

    It sounds good, but most powerful? No.

    I really hope RISC-V makes it, because of screwy things Intel & AMD have done. Like their management processor, with basically a hidden back door.

    • Performance is pretty much marketing hyperbole at this point; one would expect early adopter hardware to be slow. Nevertheless, this offers quad cores and a decent amount of RAM at a reasonable price.

      The strategic importance is not necessarily a switch from ARM to RISC-V but as a secondary supplier. Pine64 was founded as a company producing electronics based around Allwinner. But when that company's offerings proved to be a technological dead end, Pine64 have been migrating to Rockchip - however to their di

      • Hopefully the supposedly forthcoming GPU driver sources actually come forth. That was a sticking point for the original Pine64 for a long time, with Allwinner promising to release drivers and get them mainlined for practically ages. (I have an original Pine64 2GB plus the WiFi+Bt card. It's decent.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gmack ( 197796 )

          The sticking point for my original Pine64 was the fact that it randomly wouldn't boot or crashed soon after. They blamed the power supply even though I bought it from them as well. Whole thing ended up in the trash. Not going to ever buy another Pine64.

          • Well fair enough, what I experienced is that it's slightly picky about SD cards as well. It wouldn't work with one of my crap ones, so I had to buy a new one. As an aside-longer-than-the-comment, I haven't looked at benchmarks lately, but last time I did, by far the fastest card for random reads and writes (I wouldn't have thought a SD card could be bad on random reads before researching, but some are garbage at it!) was a Samsung Evo or Evo+ 16GB or larger. Might be something better now, dunno.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gmack ( 197796 )
              I bought the kit that came with the USB, case, touchscreen and SD to avoid exactly these sorts of problems. Since you mentioned Samsung, I have multiple devices that hate the Samsung SD cards.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Shinobi ( 19308 )

                Samsung cards work well for me, both in SBC's and in phones and cameras. In the photo and tinkering circles I'm in, Samsung are the go-to recommendation, because of so few problems. Are you sure you don't have a faulty power outlet that causes power surges etc, damaging your equipment?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The market is saturated with these boards. It needs some unique selling point. Mid range performance isn't it.

      Fast, power efficient, cheap, any of them would do.

    • As a veteran of the Great Processor Performance Wars of the '90s, mostly RISCs vs. AMD vs. Intel, my conclusion was performance is driven more by process, not architecture. The RISC processors ought to have run circles around x86 architectures. But if you invest a billion or so dollars into building a fab, you can throw enough transistors and design at making a convoluted architecture fast.

      Apple, with M1 and M2, is providing a counterstory, I'll add. Clever design appears to matter once again.

      So I think the

      • Intel also invested effort into removing the restrictions that normally come with CISC where the register usage is all over the place and some instructions can't use this register and others always trash this one and so on. They effectively tunnelled a "RISCy" subset of x86 as the most efficient path and asked developers and compiler writers to use those more than the old ones that did complicated things in a fiddly way. And these days everything is vector units where even the ARM spec is providing instruct

        • Intel also invested effort into removing the restrictions that normally come with CISC... So while their process was extremely important for outdoing the competition, they did acknowledge that they couldn't just make a 486 faster forever, they had to evolve and borrow the best bits of RISC too.

          Absolutely right. I didn't follow the details of the evolution of the x86 instruction set. What astounded me was it was even possible to decode and execute CISC x86 instructions on a RISC core using only hardware, and faster than a native RISC processor. It only worked because they could throw legions of transistors at the problem and that was enabled by better processes.

          It's actually a pretty stunning engineering achievement because all levels, compilers, ISA, architecture, and fabrication, had to work or

  • So they've finally updated that legendary command-line IMAP client to run on the newest hardware, eh?

  • Great. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Subsentient ( 6901388 )
    Make sure your fucking drivers work this time. Maybe hire someone instead of expecting unpaid volunteers to write niche drivers for you. I still have my pinephone community edition, drivers are still incredibly unstable and it crashes almost daily, even with the latest kernel.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shinobi ( 19308 )

      Uh, you bought a phone they explicitly warn you has unstable software and that they only recommend it for developers who intend to work on the software... And you whine about the software being unstable...

      You are clearly suffering from ID10T error, and should tattoo that on your forehead to aid future tech support triage your issues.

  • Nice. I like it. (Score:3)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Saturday July 02, 2022 @03:09AM (#62667602)

    Cheap full-featured completely FOSS/H computing: We need more of this.

    • At this point I'd already be happy for any computing that is actually available at less than 5000% scalper markup.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kazymyr ( 190114 )

      I can't wait to run a full distribution on actual RiscV hardware. Running under qemu emulation only gets you that far.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mike449 ( 238450 )

      Cheap, full-featured, completely FOSS/H?
      I am afraid you will still need to chose any 2 out of 3.

  • One of the main reason x86 is so strong is that there was a hardware architecture built around it, the "IBM PC" and it's many clones. It usually didn't matter what brand of PC you bought as you could run any PC software and even operating system on it. The operating system only needed a comparatively small amount of drivers to support nearly every PC. Things like Keyboard, Mouse, non-accelerated graphics, mass storage or USB conform to a small set of hardware standards. Today you can just assume your PC has

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kriston ( 7886 )

      All ARM SoC, regardless of vendor, use the same instruction set.

      Even modern MIPS64 can't say that. It's the RISC architecture that succeeded and failed almost at the same time.

  • I am not a programmer so I am wondering if this system offers an end-user (I am still a geek and in IT as a career) anything over the raspberry units when it comes to tinkering, etc.

    • Not unless you want to play with RISC-V specifically, no. The raspi also has a developed community which is frankly the best reason to use one (there are better boards, but none better supported.)

  • I look forward to seeing the product page and "sold out" button... :) https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/07/01/218236/pine64-is-working-on-a-risc-v-single-board-computer#

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