Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roark66 | Hacker News Reader

I wish they included a proper spec sheet for their cpu: SOPHGO CV1800B

I've spent few minutes searching and I don't know, can I use this for machine vision applications? Does it support serial cameras (Csi)? Does it have hardware support for h264(h265 or even better vp9) encoding/decoding? What is the number of Tops of its "vector accelerator"?

I suspect they don't put info like this out front is that it probably is lower than established rockchip chips.

The price is significantly lower too, but for when I need to run embedded Linux I also need video/camera acceleration etc. For devices that don't need a camera/voice interface like a Smart switch, a weather station etc this is massive overkill.

So it is a case risc v being cool, but there is still no clear winning niche for it that I know of.

Here is what I found:

Minimal Documentation: https://milkv.io/docs/duo/getting-started/cv1800b Datasheet: https://github.com/milkv-duo/hardware

Reading the datasheet, it looks like there is one C906 cpu with 700 Mhz without the the vector extension and one C906 cpu at 1Ghz with rvv 0.7.1. The C906 design has been opensourced and is available here: https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc906

The C906 supports rv64gc with optional rvv 0.7.1 with a vlen of 128, but a 256 wide ALU.

They list H.264/H.265 support, but I don't think it's a standardized extension.

But see my other comment about using the pre ratification vector extension: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377439#36378911

BTW, the chip vendor is sophgo, they have a github account with a lot of open source code for these chips here https://github.com/sophgo

Exactly the same, RV64 or RV32, USB device hardware block?

Would a spec sheet really help? For the use cases you are talking about, I wouldn't want to touch anything that doesn't come with actual datasheets and application notes, unless you're just doing it for fun. (i.e. the lack of spec sheet isn't really the obstacle here)

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