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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

Any "Pi'esc" boards available yet? I would love to run Buster on a RISC-V board.

Seeedstudio has an "Arduino'esc" RISC-V board for around USD 30 which looks very interesting. [1]

This board [2] also looks very interesting but is around USD 1000 and I can't find any comparisons on performance to a "regular" PC. I know these things are like comparing apples to oranges but I would like to know how for example a browser performs loading a webpage in comparison with another CPU.

There also appears to be an expansion board with PCI so you can add a GPU for USD 2000. [3]

[1] https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-Maixduino-Kit-for-RISC-V-...

[2] https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unleashed

[3] https://www.crowdsupply.com/microsemi/hifive-unleashed-expan...

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Just informational: the esc sound meaning "-like" is rendered as esque. We "borrowed" it from the French, and we're not giving it back.

Similarly to "isch" from German, which we filed the serial numbers off of, and respelled "ish". For some reason we are squeamish about doing that to French.

Perhaps ironically, we took squeamish from French escoymous, but substituted "our" suffix.

"From Middle English -ish, -isch, from Old English -isċ (“-ish”, suffix), from Proto-Germanic -iskaz (“-ish”), from Proto-Indo-European -iskos."

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ish

Yeah, it's a little misleading to say that English borrowed that ending from German, English is a Germanic language and always had it.

Ok, and "-ish" and "-esque" clearly both trace back to the Proto-indo-european. So we're really just talking about spelling standards, which are a recent innovation.

The Unleashed board has a performance similar to a Raspberry Pi 3 in cpu terms but it's biggest bottleneck is that the SD card is running on a SPI bus where it gets something like 2MB/s. This is due to having the complete SOC as opensource and the SD card association not allowing open source IP for it's interface.

I think there's some degree of compatibility between SD-card and MMC-card standards, and that the latter are comparatively more open. Surely that could solve the open-IP issue?

Last time I looked both MMC and SD were JEDEC standards available under the same terms?

It does have gigabit ethernet and there's also an expansion board with SATA and PCIe but that's another $2000 because it's using an enormous FPGA.

Although it won't solve the general performance problems (it's a slow rocketchip impl) you should be using NBD root. That's what we use for the Fedora/RISC-V builders.

Whoa, I had considered the unleashed board to play around with and bookmarked it, but they are not very overt with the price. I didn't realize it was $1000 USD. You have to click through twice to discover it.

You might consider the HiFive board. It's around 50 dollar, a more appropriate price for something to play around with.

The hifive is marketed as an arduino-like, but at 320mHz it seems like it should be able to run a stripped-down Linux distro. Not fast, but if Linux can run on puny MIPS boards...

You can run Linux on at Atmega664. Not well, but you can.

https://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%2...

It doesn't appear to have any DRAM, so you'd have to find a linux capable of running in 16 (sixteen) kilobytes of onchip SRAM. Without an MMU.

The chips used in the hifive board are not available for sale anywhere. They're apparently a one-off run for the hifive board specifically.

Therefore, they're not a good choice to base a project on.

I do look forward at low power microcontrollers based on risc-v with some actual commitment to continued availability.

Yeah would love to have a RISC-V board with similar performance as a Pi and that isn't as expensive as the hifive unleashed. Haven't found anything yet.

The likely source will be lowrisc.org. Several folks that were involved with the Rpi are on the project.

"We will produce a SoC design to populate a low-cost community development board and to act as an ideal starting point for derivative open-source and commercial designs." - https://www.lowrisc.org/docs/untether-v0.2/

I wouldn't hold your breath (although I wish them luck). There are however a bunch of low cost high performance RV64 chips coming this year and next from China that will change things dramatically. (I'm a Fedora/RISC-V maintainer, and I'm in Beijing today and tomorrow talking to RISC-V people. It's 23:57 here, got to go to bed :-/ )

Do you know what companies are making them? I'd love to take a closer look as I've also been looking for a risc-v rpi alternative.

As is always the way with these things, unfortunately I'm under an NDA until the products are released. However I can tell you the rather obvious thing: We're helping them to understand how to get changes they need integrated into upstream communities (kernel, GCC, binutils, uboot in particular) so that their hardware will boot without patching when or soon after it is released.

The cheapest are indeed the devices based on the sipeed chip.

If that's insufficient, your best bet is to get a risc-v capable FPGA.

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