[HN Gopher] RISC-V Guns for Raspberry Pi, Legacy Chips
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RISC-V Guns for Raspberry Pi, Legacy Chips
Author : ystad
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-07-14 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| johnhenry wrote:
| Oh, thank goodness! For second, I thought someone was hacking
| into firearms.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| What is a "RISC-V gun"?
| inetsee wrote:
| I believe the meaning is that RISC-V is trying to take market
| share from Raspberry Pi and Legacy Chips. It's a rarely used
| meaning for the word "guns" which is probably why it's
| confusing. A better title might be "RISC-V Seeks to Challenge
| Raspberry Pi and Legacy Chips".
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| It's a quite commonly used meaning of "guns" though, at least
| in American English.
| happyopossum wrote:
| It's more commonly used in the form of 'gunning for' than
| 'guns', but yeah - it's not uncommon.
| goodpoint wrote:
| An artifact of bad writing.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I'm assuming English isn't your first language?
|
| Gun/gunning for is a term of phrase that means that one is
| trying to win/unseat another in a competitive sense.
|
| "Guns" is a verb in the title, not a noun.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I get it now, and feel dumb - the idiom "gunning for", etc.
| But my brain instantly latched onto it as a noun, and kept
| imagining some feature of RISC-V that maybe "shoots" code
| into other chips.
| cstrahan wrote:
| I had the same trouble as you. I think the problem is that
| I've only ever seen "gunning for", specifically. For
| example, I've never seen "gun for" as in "Man, that's one
| determined team! I bet they gun for nothing less than the
| win!" -- I would expect that to be phrased "... are gunning
| for nothing less ...".
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I mean I don't blame you, that interpretation sounds a lot
| more fun.
| kissiel wrote:
| > 40-pin GPIO Header (28 x GPIO, 12C, 12S, SPI, UART)
|
| 12C and 12S - two of my favorite buses!
|
| Are those things really retyped by hand?
| bhouston wrote:
| :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2S
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2C
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Good! We need more small systems. Not just CPUs-on-a-board for
| hackers to prototype with but an alternative to Intel NUCs and
| smaller fully integrated computers with inexpensive low power
| CPUs.
|
| It's astonishing to me how behind the ARM ecosystem is on this. I
| still can't buy something like a low-end amd64 computer easily
| with ARM. There's a few laptops and a few cantankerous oddballs
| like the ROCKPro64. Then again it's Pine64 mentioned in the RISC
| V article, so maybe we have more years of oddballs to go.
| qubex wrote:
| I strongly suggest you take a look at the FireFly 3588 ITX
| board with the latest high-performance Rockchip SoC and PCI-e.
|
| https://en.t-firefly.com/product/industry/itx3588j
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| power consumption ================= Idle:
| 1.3 W Normal: 4.8 W Max: 20.0 W
|
| Well this looks interesting for a NAS. Not cheap though at $
| 459.00 for the most basic package.
| jandrese wrote:
| 4xSATA ports so it will be a fairly modest NAS, also at
| that price point it has a lot of competition from budget
| CPUs and mini-ITX mainboards.
|
| It looks like it could be a pretty nice little SFF desktop.
| The low power draw means you don't need active cooling and
| it has everything built in so you won't need some dongle
| (other than power) to integrate. The only issue is that
| it's not Intel so if your employee needs to run MS Office
| or be managed from the domain it won't work. But for the
| receptionist or for a kiosk or many other uses this could
| be pretty nice, especially if you are trying to cut down on
| energy use.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| It also has an M.2 slot for the I/O heavy stuff. There is
| a natural limit to how fast you want to stream movies
| from disk, so I wouldn't care. Its just that for the same
| price, I can get a Synology with a 4C Celeron which
| wouldn't be much worse at far less effort.
| jandrese wrote:
| It also has a PCIe x4 Gen 3 slot that you could drop a
| SATA card in if you really want to go big.
|
| A 10 second search turns up plenty of options that will
| turn that port into 10+ SATA ports for like $65. Dunno
| about the driver situation in that case though.
|
| The single M.2 slot would probably be used for the OS and
| maybe a cache. Having just 1 fast drive in an array
| usually isn't a win.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > The low power draw means you don't need active cooling
|
| If it's a desktop, you can put on a large heatsink, there
| are plenty of passive enclosures for the standard intel
| NUC
|
| > But for the receptionist
|
| Seems like those would be better off with an 'all-in-one'
| computer in a monitor, less cables and you need a screen
| anyway
| aliqot wrote:
| before I even look, is this in-stock?
| jws wrote:
| Allegedly ~15 of each model are in the store at the moment.
| [deleted]
| superdug wrote:
| Looks to be 113 of them in stock right now
| goombacloud wrote:
| "Supports UEFI Boot" - This sounds good already for booting
| generic Linux distributions, now the question is how well the
| mainline kernel supports this board. Having to use a special-
| patched kernel is a no-go if you care about using this board
| after a few years when it becomes niche. The Libre Computer
| boards are a good example in this regard
| (https://libre.computer/products/) they are very niche but
| since the mainline kernel supports them and they use UEFI by
| default, you can use most generic Linux distros without a
| problem.
| jws wrote:
| That board has the kitchen sink.
|
| 4 big cores and 4 little cores at 8nm, 2 gigibit ethernets,
| an AI processor, Wifi6, 5G, 32G RAM, PCIe 3.0, M.2, 4 SATA, 2
| HDMI, VGA, HDMI in, RS232, CAN... and idles at 1.3W. Typical
| ~4W, max 20W.
|
| $460 for basic 4G RAM, 16G storage, prices go up from there.
| bpye wrote:
| Sadly no SMMU :(
| pjc50 wrote:
| That's a pretty good idle power just to keep all those
| links up.
| kevwil wrote:
| Why is "Guns" capitalized if the word is being used as a verb?
| Anybody else wonder for a moment what guns have a CPU
| architecture style? LOL Nobody else? Ok, carry on.
| Narishma wrote:
| It's capitalized like the rest of the words because it's in a
| title.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It's all about the peripherals. Make them not suck and document
| them well and you could have a chance. Follow ESP32's lead and
| you'll just be another also-ran.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| For a great overview of the SiFive that's highlighted in this
| article, check out Explaining Computers' video from May:
| https://youtu.be/4PoWAsBOsFs
|
| tl;dr the dual core processor is quite slow, but relatively
| stable running the software that can compile for it so far in
| Linux.
|
| It seems like Vision Five is at least pushing things forward a
| bit on the software side, unlike some of the other hardware
| manufacturers of SBCs.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| this person makes one important point with regards to the
| reasons for adaptability of RISC-v. X86 is a monopoly of the US
| government via intel and amd. they can literally force these
| companies to pull out of a nation, crippling their entire life
| through and through.
|
| people do not like that believe it or not. its not fun having
| the USA hold your country hostage because you do not have
| alternatives. ARM is the same so RISC-V is a good contender to
| get behind for entire nations because they can fall back on
| this and besides, if there is no monopoly of x86/arm in the
| first place because RISC-v or some other architecture is
| common, the american armtwisting is reduced as the attack
| surface would be smaller.
|
| china, russia, iran, india can develop their own thing,
| separate or together but not dependent on american generosity
| that can turn hostile, as it has in the past
| hajile wrote:
| I like the idea, but they need to make the chip actually open so
| decent drivers can be created. Most non-Pi SBCs are terribly hard
| to get working.
| sheepybloke wrote:
| Completely agree! I bought a couple of Orange Pi Zero's a while
| ago to make a small cluster. As soon as you want to do
| something slightly more than just booting it into linux, you
| quickly fall into a space with little to no documentation. If
| you're lucky, you can find a sketchy media share site with some
| documents, or an abandoned forum post. Incredibly annoying when
| you just want to get something running.
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| the pi is remarkably less open than many of these other sbcs.
| its just more popular in both developer and mindshare
| oneplane wrote:
| The Broadcom chip, yes, but the NDA-encumbered firmware has
| been reduced to such an extent that you can in fact boot this
| either fully-functional with very few closed blobs, or
| almost-fully-functional with no closed blobs at all.
|
| All device drivers onwards are just open and can be kept up
| to date and used in custom kernels all you want. This is the
| big difference with other SBCs where you can't really use the
| devices without closed, version-locked drivers and blobs, and
| there is no incentive for the manufacturer to make a super-
| thin encumbered shim to give the most leverage and freedom
| for everyone else to build on top of that.
|
| The popularity didn't arrive before the intent and work was
| done to make it hackable, it was the other way around. That,
| in turn, created the mindshare to make community-driven
| drivers and alternate firmwares for the VideoCore boot stage.
|
| This is also why they kept the BCM lineage as simple as
| possible across the PI revisions so all the public reverse
| engineering and hard work wasn't for nothing and was still
| portable.
|
| None of this can be said about any RockChip, MediaTek or
| HiSilicon SoC. Those are more of a consume-and-throw-away
| type of deal, except for maybe the high-end long-life
| platforms that share IP with Android devices that also happen
| to have PM-OS or some XDA fanbase to work on it. Even then
| they usually lack community knowledge and commercial effort
| to make it worthwhile.
|
| The closest was the TI-based series like the BeagleBone, and
| that was for precisely the same reason the Pi got a good
| start. The bad thing about the BeagleBone was that it didn't
| have a "see something on your monitor out of the box"
| experience.
| jandrese wrote:
| BeagleBones also don't seem to get updated very often. The
| BeagleBone black is overdue for a version 2 with a faster
| CPU, double the memory, and double the built-in eMMC;
| especially at the $50 price point.
| gnramires wrote:
| There's also the Olimex boards (and related Freedombox
| project)[1], which can boot with no binary blobs :)
|
| They have an interesting philosophy in their definition of
| OSHW includes _making it easy for others to produce their
| boards_. So not just publishing schematics, but
| facilitating manufacturing as much as possible.
|
| > Olimex's A20 OLinuXino Lime2 is a fully Open Source
| Hardware (OSHW) single board computer. This means that the
| designer is actively helping people using the platform for
| their own designs, and supports them in adding hardware
| functionality and production advice. This is a part of
| freedom that is often overlooked, but very much aligned
| with the FreedomBox goals.
|
| [1]
| https://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox/Hardware/A20-OLinuXino-
| Li...
|
| [1b] https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLin
| uXino-...
|
| [1c] https://www.armbian.com/olimex-lime-2-emmc/
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| i have olimexs sunxi boards and they have a blob
| bootloader with no sources so they are not completely
| covered, only hardware as it mentions. but this is common
| for arm of course.
|
| on the flipside thats still leagues above rpis and you
| can buy the chips for your own use unlike the broadcom
| ones
| sylware wrote:
| I am still looking for a shmall board with a USB-C connector and
| tons of GPIOs, with a RISC-V _64bits_ SOC (for
| keyboards/mice/etc).
| mort96 wrote:
| Why 64-bit exactly? Do you have uses for tiny boards with more
| than 4GiB of virtual address space?
| sylware wrote:
| I would like to write 64bits assembly code paths directly. I
| know RISC-V ISA has good 64bis->32bits compatibility, but I
| am looking for something definitive here.
| klelatti wrote:
| It's not RISC-V 'gunning' for RPi, it's certain SBC manufacturers
| who think that a RISC-V board will enable them to compete with
| RPi.
|
| It may, but the success of these boards will largely depend on
| other factors. RPi has succeeded because of their clear focus and
| really strong execution.
|
| It will probably disappoint many but having a CPU with an open
| ISA isn't going to be an overriding factor in determining whether
| any particular SBC succeeds in the market.
| worik wrote:
| If they can make it available they will be doing well.
|
| I cannot find any Raspberry Pis for sale anywhere I can buy
| one.
| musingsole wrote:
| From where I'm at, Raspberry Pis are plenty available, just
| selling for 30-40% more than they might have a couple years
| ago.
| bhouston wrote:
| I would strongly recommend that Raspberry Pi explore a RISC-V
| line of SBCs. They already have established that they are not
| locked to ARM with the recent Pico device
| (https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-pico/), so
| they might as well do a RISC-V line.
|
| RISC-V is much more open than ARM, but it is definitely lacking
| in performance and widespread support (and integrated GPU?.) Thus
| do not dump the ARM line, but add an alternative so as this
| market further develops, Raspberry Pi is there.
|
| (I found this: https://abopen.com/news/raspberry-pi-foundation-
| announces-ri...)
| fbkr wrote:
| Raspberry Pi Pico is ARM though.
| klelatti wrote:
| > They already have established that they are not locked to ARM
| with the recent Pico device.
|
| Pico is based on two ARM Cortex M0+ CPUs.
| suprjami wrote:
| Broadcom don't want an open hardware platform. Look at the
| license on the Pi bootloader and their legal behaviour when
| Odroid started selling a Pi clone. The entire Pi hardware
| ecosystem is setup so that the Pi Foundation are at the top of
| the food chain and it's been a massive success. RISC-V is the
| last thing Broadcom want on a Raspberry Pi.
|
| Don't misunderstand this as a criticism either. The rest of the
| hobbyist SBC ecosystem has had no such guidance or overarching
| plan, and it's a complete mess of overpriced and/or poorly
| supported boards. Broadcom put in the hard yards to make their
| product successful and we're all better off for it.
| bhouston wrote:
| Does Boardcom own Raspberry Pi? Or are they independent
| entities? Is there a contractual obligation between the two
| that prevents Raspberry Pi from using other CPU vendors?
|
| If there is a requirement to stick with Boardroom, can
| Broadcom start experimenting with RISC-V? It is probably
| strategy for Broadcom as well...
|
| BTW I found this: https://abopen.com/news/raspberry-pi-
| foundation-announces-ri...
| suprjami wrote:
| All the Pi Foundation engineers are either Broadcom
| employees or ex employees still affiliated with the parent.
| So yes, Broadcom do effectively own and control the
| Raspberry Pi Foundation.
|
| Again that's fine and the 10+ years of excellent Raspberry
| Pi user experience speak for themselves. I'm glad Broadcom
| did this.
|
| But the purpose is to sell Broadcom SBCs, not to make an
| open source hardware platform.
|
| IF there is a RISC-V Pi, it'll be because Broadcom see
| benefit for the rest of their product lines. Not to make
| open source Linux and ISA nerds happy.
| nsteel wrote:
| > Broadcom do effectively own and control the Raspberry
| Pi Foundation.
|
| I'm not sure this is true. Do we have any actual proof?
| klelatti wrote:
| It's false:
|
| https://find-and-update.company-
| information.service.gov.uk/c...
| klelatti wrote:
| > But the purpose is to sell Broadcom SBCs, not to make
| an open source hardware platform.
|
| RPi's purpose is educational - consistent with their
| charitable status - it's definitely not to sell Broadcom
| SoCs or (except to the extent that this overlaps with
| their educational purpose) to make an open source
| hardware platform - although it seems a lot of commenters
| here think it is or should be.
| justin66 wrote:
| A less tinfoil-hat view is that Raspberry Pi, who have
| been members of the RISC-V foundation for years, will
| evaluate the possibility of a RISC-V Pi when someone
| capable of producing a RISC-V SoC in volume offers to
| produce one at an attractive price.
| klelatti wrote:
| > So yes, Broadcom do effectively own and control the
| Raspberry Pi Foundation.
|
| This is definitively false and anyone can look at the
| foundation's governance and legal and financial structure
| to see this.
| topspin wrote:
| > All the Pi Foundation engineers are either Broadcom
| employees or ex employees still affiliated with the
| parent. So yes, Broadcom do effectively own and control
| the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
|
| And yet RP2040 exists; an in-house ARM design
| manufactured by TSMC.
| ncmncm wrote:
| Is there an objective reason to prefer RISC-V over some POWERx
| generation?
|
| If you were designing a chip to go into a high-end- _ish_
| product, would basing it on POWER cause you any greater
| difficulty than RISC-V?
| classichasclass wrote:
| The required number of instructions to implement for basic
| Linux support is rather larger on Power ISA than RISC-V. But
| you'd have currently better software support as a result, so it
| may be a wash depending on where your development effort goes.
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