The BeagleV was supposed to be one of the first affordable single-board computers with a RISC-V processor. But the board, which was introduced in January, never went into mass production and the whole project was cancelled in July.
But now StarFive has unveiled a new single-board computer with similar specs but a slightly different design. It’s called the VisionFive V1, and it’s a 3.9″ x 2.8″ computer board powered by a 1.5 GHz dual-core SiFive U74 processor based on RISC-V architecture.
The chip includes AI features for computer vision and other machine learning tasks, as well as support for hardware-accelerated video decoding for 4K video at up to 60 Hz or two 4K/30Hz displays.
Other features of the VisionFive V1 include 8GB of LPDDR4 memory, a microSD card for storage, and ports including:
- 1 x Gigabit Ethernet
- 1 x HDMI 1.4
- 1 x 3.5mm audio
- 4 x USB 3.0
- 1 x USB Type-C (for power)
There’s also a 40-pin GPIO header, MIPI-DSI and MIPI-CSI connectors for displays and/or cameras, and built-in support for WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2.
The board will ship with support for Fedora Linux as well as other operating systems including Yocto, Buildroot, FreeRTOS, and Zephyr, with plans to add support for other operating systems in the future.
While StarFive hasn’t announced a release date yet, the company is set to give a talk about the VisionFive V1 on December 8th during the RISC-V summit, and according to a set of slides prepared for the presentation, the board will sell for $149.
The slides also mention plans for an upcoming VisionFive V2 board with a quad-core U74 processor, a GPU with “high performance” 3D graphics support, and support for PCIe 2.0 x2 and HDMI 2.0.
via LinuxGizmos, RVspace forum, and CNX Software
I wonder at which manufacturing node they will be cost effective against ARM (10% cheaper?). They are going to have to fight the “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” mentality with ARM customers.
AFAIK, a big factor in the BeagleV getting cancelled was cache coherency-related design problems in the JH7100, and general bugginess. Presumably most of the issues will be ironed out in the JH7110 (that the presentation will be used in the VisionFive V2), but anyone planning on getting one of these V1s should be prepared for a bumpy ride.
They position it as a “vision” SoC and claim it supports Tensorflow Light and Caffe, but never mentions what is it capable of. Why? Does it have something rudimentary which is 1000 times slower than Jetson Nano? Or is it faster?
According to the data sheet, it has a Cadence/Tensilica VP6 DSP for vision processing, a deep learning accelerator based on Nvidia’s NVDLA, and a proprietary neural network engine. You can find the data sheet just by searching for the SoC name.