In keeping with the trail blazed by the POWER folks, I present to you… a RISC-V news and megathread!
SiFive’s HiFive Unmatched, originally scheduled to have 8GB of RAM, will now ship with 16GB.
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I am interested in what happens with this. I know that the 8GiB of RAM was hamstringing some of the developers. I just wish it had at least Pi4 performance if not Odroid-N2 performance for that price.
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Here are 2 articles that I found:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/blog/2020/12/31/a-look-back-at-risc-v-development-timeline-in-2020/
There was also an article titled “Chinese RISC-V Chip Startup Secures Financing” on chinamoneynetwork, but it’s under a paywall, so Φvcc them.
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BeagleV RISC-V board announced:
https://beaglev.seeed.cc/
8 gb version sign-up and pre-order for $149, the 4 gb version (who knows when it’s available) will cost for $119. The first batch should be available in April.
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That’s fantastic!
Much, much better value than SiFive’s 8GB board at around $700, especially considering that it uses a SiFive processor.
I’m really happy to see how quickly we’re getting options. 
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After Beagle went in the RISC-V game, now Pine64 just entered the ring as well.
In the above blogpost, they announced they will be making a RISC-V board. Their first RISC-V design was a soldering iron containing a very basic chip. They will be making a SBC featuring a C906 64bit CPU coupled with an auxiliary 32bit BL602 SoC for WiFi and BT. It should have a USB 2 port and Gigabit Ethernet.
The price? They are aiming for an under $15 board, so as many people as possible can enter the RISC-V arena.
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Pine has a following on Leve1Techs, so we’ll flood this thread when it’s released. 
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The first person to solve this riddle wins a Pine64 RISC-V SBC.
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MIPS, the company behind the MIPS architecture, is switching to RISC-V.
This is also a substantial business model shift for them, but RISC-V is the main point.
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https://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20210423090342
OpenBSD commits initial RISC-V support for 64-bit processors.
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It is about time.
I’m expecting everything to be on fire in here
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And an opinion piece
$2bn acquisition offer.
No. Just no. I wouldn’t trust Intel, nVidia, nor AMD for that matter with RISC-V IP. I would maybe trust IBM, due to the openness of Power architecture (well, not the CPUs themselves unfortunately, just the platforms around it), but I think RISC-V ought to be in the hands of a company similar to Pine64 or the FSF (albeit I don’t think either of them have the funds to continue such large-scale research as an ISA). SiFive proved itself by making the ISA and architecture open from the get-go. I hope they stay independent. I don’t think there’s lack of interest from companies like Western Digital and heck, I see ZTE, Huawei and AlibabaCloud joined the premier members rank (not that I trust those any more than Intel, just pointing out big interest and potential sponsorship). I also see Arduino in the members list, which would be an interesting acquisition / merger.
Speaking of members, there’s also Adafruit, Eclipse and FreeBSD Foundation and lots more. The point is that there is a lot of interest in the company and I doubt that selling it would benefit their cause. I’m not against an acquisition per-se, I’m only against someone monopolizing the design and changing the licensing on future designs or even on existing ones. And there are plenty of reasons not to trust big guys like Intel (if they want to be trusted, they should open the x86 ISA, albeit at this point x86 is a steaming pile of garbage, considering what Apple can do with ARM).
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I wouldn’t trust Intel, nVidia, nor AMD for that matter with RISC-V IP.
Intel and AMD both have a track record for supporting open source. I don’t trust (or like) Nvidia one bit, but the others are okay at least in regard to openness.
Business methodology, on the other hand? Nope. We need open chip IP, and you need a soul to develop out something like that in today’s climate.
I’d like to see AMD, Qualcomm, Intel, and Western Digital take ownership stakes in SIFive, but keep it independent.
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Are there any affordable sbc’s built on this yet?
BeagleV is $150, Nezha is $99. There is the PineCone at $4 or so, but that’s supposed to be just a development board for IoT with Bluetooth and WiFi, not exactly the same category as something like Raspberry Pis. And I’m pretty sure it can’t run a full Linux distro, just RTOS.
Apparently there is a Sipeed SBC for $12.5 running an Allwinner XuanTie C906 RISC-V CPU, board capable of running Debian. I didn’t look for links to buy, I don’t expect developer boards to be ready for people like me to use, so I let developers buy the stuff first and do their thing on them. Which is why I’m currently looking into ARM stuff, like Pi Dramble clustering. When cheap RISC-V SBCs with performance comparable to a Rockchip RK3399 come to the market, I will probably get into those. In the meantime, I’m more interested in what is achievable with the Rasbperry Pi CM4 and all the insane add-on board that are coming up, like the MirkoPC, Wiretrustee SATA and the Turing Pi 2.
Can I use it as a USB controller and device expander
hello what
Find me a link I’m a developer now
lol
You should look into older PC platforms as well. Many capabilities that no one really pays attention to.
No idea, I’m not into electronics, but more into low-powered computing.
I can’t seem to find the $13 SBC from Sipeed, but I found Sipeed MaixCube which has a Kendryte K210 dual-core RISC-V processor (400 MHz) and can run Linux. It’s $34.
There’s also Maixduino for $35, featuring an Arduino form-factor
Those 2 are in stock. Prices obviously don’t include shipping. The Nezha campaign on indiegogo seems to have ended. The BeagleV had a limited batch as well, they said that April had a “pilot run for community” - not sure what that means. There are 2 videos on youtube about the BeagleV:
Your chances of getting your hands on one of the newer, better-speced stuff for cheap are kinda slim.
While I admire people running old PCs for all sorts of stuff and for all sorts of reasons (especially a fan of old PowerMac stuff on Void Linux), I am not part of the crowd for old hardware. I use some “old” hardware (if the 12 years old 45nm Xeon X3450 based on Lynnfield inside my Proxmox server can be considered old - or the similarly aged Sempron 145 I unlocked to Athlon x2 4450e), but that’s only because of some circumstances (I got the CPU, mobo and ECC RAM from work, I decommissioned an old server that has had its run and I had the Sempron since it was brand new, bought it in 2010 IIRC). I prefer low-powered computers, the ones I like the most are my Pi 2,3 and 4 and my 2 systems featuring an ASRock J3455M (pfSense and Proxmox).
Another thing I am struggling with, very deeply, is my desire to expand my home lab, while also not wanting to have lots of devices around me anymore. I don’t look for deals on ebay, because I know I can find really cheap stuff, like old laptops with broken screens or really old desktops that can be used as servers. I want to have first of all, portable setups (which is why I’m insane about my Pi 4 so much) and second of all, low-power consumption. One market I did not try to look into was old Intel Atom-based thin-clients, but those things are most likely weaker than the RPi 2 while using more power, so I’d rather get those instead. Which I think I will at some point, they would make for awesome Master K3s nodes, while I could run Pi 3s and 4s (and similar, like RockPro64, Rock64 or Rock Pi 4, the last not being made by Pine64) as Worker nodes.
I had 4 PCs and my tablet at one point, which started getting ridiculous when it came to using them (with only 3 HDMI inputs for my TV). Thankfully I repurposed 2 PCs as Proxmox servers, 1 is on standby, not sure what to do with it and the tablet is kind of a failed experiment (Firefox crashes with just 2 GB of RAM and 2 GB of swap with just it and the OS running). I should probably stop here, before RISC-V general thread becomes just Biky’s blog.
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