PicoRio: The Raspberry Pi-Like Small-Board Computer for RISC-V

In the last discussion about the PicoRio, there were concerns about the Imagination PowerVR GPU in the phase 2 device (which will be late next year according to this blog post, with phase 1 coming late this year).

Comment about those concerns here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380452

It seems like they are addressing that somewhat:

> Imagination embraces the RISC-V ecosystem

> Imagination’s PowerVR GPU Driver (DDK v1.13 release onwards) supports RISC-V as a target application processor and will be easily integrated with the PicoRio single-board computer platform.

> Imagination is also creating a new open-source GPU driver to provide a complete, up-streamed open-source kernel and user-mode driver stack to support Vulkan® and OpenGL® ES within the Mesa framework. It will be openly developed with intermediate milestones visible to the open-source community and a complete open-source Linux driver will be delivered by Q2 2022. Imagination will work with RIOS to run the open-source GPU driver on the PicoRio open-source platform.

It sounds like the proprietary driver will be available when the first phase 2 devices ship, but an open source driver will be available ~6 months later. If it does materialize, this will be quite an open platform. I will not purchase a phase 2 or 3 device until it does, though.

Regardless, I will probably purchase a phase 1 device (which is headless / has no GPU).