[HN Gopher] SiFive to Debut RISC-V PC for Developers Based on Fr...
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SiFive to Debut RISC-V PC for Developers Based on Freedom U740
Next-Gen SoC
Author : guerby
Score : 86 points
Date : 2020-09-18 17:49 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnx-software.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnx-software.com)
| guerby wrote:
| Press release:
|
| https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200914005108/en/SiF...
| farseer wrote:
| Have not seen any RISC-V offering from the Chinese yet. I wonder
| if SiFive will have any competition.
| krasin wrote:
| Here you go: M5Stack tiny computer with a camera, LCD and
| RISC-V AI-capable Chinese chip (Kendryte K210). Available on
| Digikey for $26.50:
| https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=K027&v=2221
| [deleted]
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Please note that it has a non-working MMU and is limited to 8
| MB of DRAM. This is not the SBC you were looking for.
| m0zg wrote:
| This is not Linux-capable though. The choices are FreeRTOS
| and bare metal. The chip is pretty unbelievable at that price
| though. You get a lot of functionality for $9. And it works -
| I have it on my desk.
| jack12 wrote:
| For some value of "capable": https://github.com/torvalds/li
| nux/blob/master/arch/riscv/con...
| krasin wrote:
| Yes, it's the beauty of RISC-V: eventually, it's going to
| cover all the niches. From RFID energy-gathering chips up
| to desktop / datacenter CPUs.
|
| Right now, its use is still very fragmentary, but Kendryte
| K210 chip shows that Chinese chip designers already got
| some real experience with RISC-V, and it's safe to bet it
| will be more chips with RISC-V coming from China every
| year.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Last time I looked at it (few months ago) the K210 had
| absolutely awful documentation (datasheet was basically just
| a pinout) in English and Chinese.
|
| Not awful but for a high margin product I'd just use a US arm
| chip (e.g. LPCxx).
| krasin wrote:
| K210 has a decent AI accelerator (0.8 TFlops by their
| specs) that can run TFLite models at 300 mW). LCPxx are not
| even remotely capable of that.
| mhh__ wrote:
| True but I was looking at just for being RISC-V rather
| than the coprocessor
| rwmj wrote:
| AllWinner are doing a big run (50 million rumoured) of RISC-V
| chips through TSMC.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Do you have a source for this? I'd love to know what node
| they're using. I'm guessing no better than 12nm, but who
| knows?
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| I wonder to what extent the digital logic design is open source.
| The RISC-V core ought to be, but what about the memory controller
| or PCIE root complex, (or USB3)? Those parts are also very
| important.
| gchadwick wrote:
| Just because it's RISC-V doesn't mean it's open source. RISC-V
| is an open architecture so anyone can make an implementation
| but those implementations can be closed source. SiFive have
| released some open source stuff
| (https://github.com/sifive/freedom) but the majority of their
| work is closed source IP. In a way they're quite similar to
| arm.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Bring it on. If Arm is the future of desktop computing, it'll
| need a competitor.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The likelihood of ARM sailing off into the distance and x86
| disappearing is very slim. It's worth keeping in mind that they
| have more in common than you might think (i.e. RISC and CISC
| don't mean a huge amount any more when the old x86 instructions
| aren't used any more and ARM had/has a JavaScript instruction)
| klelatti wrote:
| Indeed, plus a viable competitor is the best way to ensure
| Nvidia is a reasonable steward of the Arm ecosystem.
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(page generated 2020-09-18 23:00 UTC)