This seems to be what became of the BeagleV thing that never really materialized except for those who got the Beta/early run boards.
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I ordered a DevTerm. Got both the A04 and the RISC-V cores, so I’ll at least have something usable since the RISC-V will be very slow. May be a couple months before it shows up as they were backordered.
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Risc-V has quite a few levels of implementations.
When in machine mode, code has access to raw memory (like ring 0 in x86). While the extremely simple chips (think micro-controller) may only have this mode, anything you are likely to run and OS on will have virtual memory and access protections (an mmu)
yeah you would think…
turns out not so much on this chips design.
this weeks news basically confirmed what i thought.
its an open architecture. (meaning little to no security) which is likely how they are so competitive.
by allowing bare metal access they can write small, fast low level code.
if something is plugged in, it will have a stack address and as long as your cpu is faster than the peripheral, you will be able to access its metal and address it directly.
which as i said, great for speed and small code, not so good for security.
oh well it i what it is 
Final layout for a RISC-V board in Model A form factor, similar CPU performance to the Quartz64, “plenty of I/O” and similar price tag to the Quartz64. Board available with both 4 and 8 GB of RAM.
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Pine has released their prototype RISC-V SBC, the Star64.
Star64 comes with a StarFive JH7110 64bit CPU sporting quad SiFive FU740 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. The SOC is equipped with BXE-2-32 from Imagination Technologies, which is said to be a solid mid-range GPU. Star64 will be available in two configurations – with 4Gb and 8GB of RAM, similarly to the Quartz64. Both hardware versions include USB 3.0 and a PCIe slot as well as two native Gigabit Ethernet NICs.
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Nice, the VisionFive 2 is also in kickstarter funding now:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2
Risc V is finally entering the mainstream computing, slowly but surely.
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Why dey do dis?
I know Imagination has pledged to opensource as of recent and has made some attempts to play nicely, but why cripple and otherwise attractive RISCV option with this?
Open refers to the ISA, not the security features.
Memory Mapped I/O is pretty common, the alternative being interupts, which don’t interact well with tickless kernels and multicore systems.
If you are targeting a desktop or server system, you’re definatly going to put a proper IOMMU on the SoC.
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Megathread necro!
Star64 releases this month (April 4th), as well as a surprise… a RISC-V variant of the Pinetab, Pinetab-V!
-V version is black, while the ARM variant is silver/grey.
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I am interested in seeing this and how it performs compared to an rpi as an SBC and how this compares to the pinebook.
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Is it using a 1.0 core? The .7 cores have a hardware flaw as they were made before the vector instruction was finalized in the 1.0 cores ratification. The GCC compiler maintainer have no intention of supporting the .7 cores now.so they will have to run a custom tool chain and compiled binaries. René from T2SDE covered this on his YT channel and is currently maintaining a build of T2 for the .7 cores since he had one of the .7 core dev boards.
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Seems to be using SiFive Essential™ 7-Series, more specifically U74. RISC-V is still moving fast so anything you buy right now is at the risk of becoming obsolete within a few years though.
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BeagleV “ahead” now available ~$150. 2GHz quadcore vs Star64 1.5GHz quadcore. Not sure which is actually more powerful. BeagleBoard.org - beaglev-ahead
Looks like the TH1520 in the Beagle-V is about 50% faster than the U74 in the Star64. Of course the Beagle is a bit more than 50% more expensive. But the TH1520 is a bit faster than a Pi4 in this benchmark. Cool there are affordable, usably-powerful RISC-V options now.
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i can’t seem to figure out whether that U74 has RVV vector stuff at all, and what version it has if it does. Apparently the TH1520 is RVV 0.7.1 and people are saying even though TH1520 is a stronger CPU core than the U74, that the U74 will probably be better supported going forward. I just don’t know if one of them is going to prove to be a poor purchase choice. idk I guess given that I have no need for either of them, they’re both a waste of money. 