Raspberry Pi receives strategic investment from Arm
newsroom.arm.com
newsroom.arm.com
RP1 and software support are their strengths and I think they won't take risks with instruction set changes or even the vendor of their particular ARM chip.
So I think this strategic investment is probably equivalent to a marketing cost - it won't stop RPi doing RISCV because they wouldn't do it anyhow. It will just help Rpi reach more people.
Do you think RPi might be hurt by not adopting RISC-V if it takes off? If some of their competitors offer it, could one of them dethrone RPi?
It'd depend entirely on the level of support a competitor offers, right? I mean that's why RPi is still so popular despite there having been a number of ARM competitors offering more power per dollar for like a decade now. The strong software support led to a strong community/overall ecosystem, which has led to a strong install base, which further improved the community and ecosystem.
It's a combination of first mover advantage with continued strong software support that keeps them so prominent as-is. I don't see why a different ISA would fundamentally change that formula.
I don’t follow the space closely but the times I’ve checked out other offerings, they’re not competitive in price/$ or it won’t have wifi or other features to be comparable.
I actually started looking at older used desktops- which are fine for some uses and not so much for others.
Also, OBS runs great on it, although it’s not taking advantage of the on-board MPP media accelerator (H.264/265 and other codecs). Apparently GStreamer has support for it though and some folks have experimental FFMPEG forks adding support.
Offering RISC-V isn't a benefit to anyone - who really cares? I would guess a tiny number of people. Only if the performance is amazing will it matter. If that performance isn't accessible via software then bad luck too. ARM is not likely to have much trouble keeping up. To beat RPi someone would probably have to accept very marginal returns - I doubt that RPi Ltd is raking in silly amounts of money. It started from a charitable foundation and has to be barely profitable but I think it has no competitors because its situation is unattractive.
Other companies will make RISCV Pi alternatives in the same format, but the RPi Foundation won’t go there.
The RPi shortage led me (and my coworkers) to examining the field of competitors, and all of them were buggier, less stable and badly documented in comparison, sadly. Perhaps that's changed since?
You've picked the wrong company to state that about. It was bought by SoftBank for way too much money, and they've been trying to make good on their bad investment ever since. The risk is low that ARM falls into a Unity-level event, but the risk is much higher than people seem to think.
Speaking from a geopolitical standpoint as a westerner, I would very much prefer if the US (x86; Intel and AMD) and UK (ARM) continue to be the forefront of microprocessor tech. RISC-V for all its virtues is ultimately primarily beneficial to China at this point, which is an entity we really do not want leading the world in the coming decades and century.
I get there might be a saving for not having to pay ARM a royalty of some kind, but are RISC-V chips cheaper in practice as a result?
I was under the impression (rightly or wrongly) that the arm royalties per chip were really small.
Once such a switch was made, Pi could even consider using free and open source cores for their low-end devices where margins are slim (an area where RISC-V has already been gaining ground rapidly).
These are the newest OoO cores with full 1.0 vector extensions, right?
[0] https://forum.sophgo.com/t/about-the-sg2380-oasis-category/3...
These cores have just been announced, and are available for licensing. You can contact SiFive if you're interested.
If what you want is hardware somebody's already made, that's going to take 2-3 years as per tradition.
>These are the newest OoO cores with full 1.0 vector extensions, right?
Yes, but so are multiple generations of predecessors. It seems that hardware based on P670[0] and X280[1] (both match that description) will be available for purchase in less than 10 months from now[2].
0. https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/7be0420e-dac1-4558-85bc...
1. https://sifive.cdn.prismic.io/sifive/9405d3d0-35a1-4680-a259...
2. https://forum.sophgo.com/t/about-the-sg2380-oasis-category/3...
Moreover, those royalties put fences on what might otherwise be more open and collaborative. It would be sad, if the tinkering goals set out originally by Raspberry Pi were curtailed by ISA license restrictions. RISC-V inherently has an edge over ARM in that dimension.
It's already happening. RISC-V doesn't need the Raspberry Pi.
Yet it would indeed be an accelerator, but I'm not sure how big. ARM are certainly very afraid.
Today, the c910 is an Apache 2, hardware proven out of order core on GitHub here https://github.com/T-head-Semi/openc910 a little slower than an RPi3's core.
Additionally it's very competitive in PPA metrics for it's gate count, so cheaper than similar cores in terms of wafer area as well.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805346421328.html?gateway...
There are better boards than the Raspberry Pi (strictly speaking specifications here). I took that path of playing with a lot of alternative boards, my biggest issue is lack of support, some boards had kernels never updated, etc...(YMMV).
If Raspberry Pi released a RISC-V board I have no reason to believe the community would not be just as strong. Sure in the beginning they would support both, but eventually the ARM support would wither.
If you are going to learn computer architecture, you will learn something cheap you have on hand
The Amiga 500 didn't make people stick to the m68k. They went IBM PC as did everyone else.
Assuming performance and software support is comparable. Which obviously won't be the case for a long long time.
But there are few things as irrelevant as the CPU instruction set. (Part from specific extensions, like AES support enabling quick crypto etc.)
The technology is what people know. Using a different SoC board, camera, ... requires adds more time to gain the same level of knowledge.
Doctors will latch onto a single product solution so they don't have to spend the time learning how to operate an alternative. Hospitals need to stock consumables based not on the best products but on what doctors know.
Airlines retain the same air crafts to reduce time spent learning to operate an alternative. Boeing marketed this as a sales feature with 737 MAX, no extra flight training required!
Software developers will often stick with the same language, even though others better fit the domain problem. Few seem willing to take the time to try and play with new concepts, languages, and operating systems.
Trying new and different things drives innovation not the world.
Some things will surely change because the hardware backed features work in a different way, but mostly it will be similar enough.
Going from a raspberry pi to an orange pi could be a much bigger leap than switching to an raspberry with RISC-V that has mature software support.
I’m going to have to disagree with that statement…
… but only because I’m in the middle of goofing around with ARM assembly on an RPi as we speak.
As much as I love tinkering, this is why I stick with RPi boards and not others. RPis do everything I need, and have amazing support in software.
That said, I'll tolerate some regression in support to switch to a RISC-V based competitor.
Want your own custom boot rom so you can start up in half a second rather than the default 3 seconds before linux gets loaded? - sorry, we can't share the code for that with you, nor the specs for you to write it yourself!
My memory told me it was the GPU that needed the blobs. So I asked at DDG
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=binary+blobs+and+the+Raspbe...
Turned up this: https://wiki.debian.org/RaspberryPi and it says...
> All Raspberry Pi models before the 4 (1A, 1B, 1A+, 1B+, Zero, Zero W, 2, 3, Zero 2 W) boot from their GPU (not from the CPU!), so they require a non-free binary blob to boot
So the 4 (and I suppose the 5, if it ever actually comes...)
Goes on to say:
> Since then, Broadcom publicly released some code, licensed as 3-Clause BSD, to aid the making of an open source GPU driver. The "rpi-open-firmware" effort to replace the VPU firmware blob started in 2016. See more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703842 . Unfortunately development of rpi-open-firmware is currently (2021-06) stalled.
So there you are. Not wrong, are you, but not strictly correct, depending on "...to run properly" definition
https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware has updates 3-months ago
NetBSD provides a filesystem image containing one kernel that will boot on all supported ARMv8 boards, you may need to write a board-specific build of u-boot to the start of that image. A Linux distribution could do the same as this.
RISC-V is very very popular already, but most RISC-V cores are not user accessible. They're controllers in hard drives, embedded management cores in SoCs, etc. Definitely nice to not have to pay for licensing that, and verification doesn't matter so much since you are more likely to be able to work around bugs in software.
I suspect it won't make a huge difference to visible CPUs. Probably the biggest impact will be flexibility.
Whilst the RISC-V instruction set is free from licence/patent fees, the design of those chips will be made by a company that will need to recover costs, so there will be a cost. Compared to ARM who already offer up free core designs for use for free like the cortex-m0 and others. I know the Raspberry PICO uses a cortex-m0x.
Over time, but that will be when you get open-source RISC-V chips that compete with the designs of the market offerings other companies make and sell. Which as a mindset may cause the evolution of RISC-V issues as people could get burned due to expectations exceeding the reality and finding the get what you pay for those to still hold stronger than envisioned. Yes, eventually open-source CPU cores will get there, but production costs and scale will still become a factor, as to many aspects that all add up to the final cost. This is even on a level of software stack tried and fully robust of equality, which is still behind ARM.
ARM may well kill off x86 as a mainstream before RISC-V fully bites it.
Look at how long ARM took to get where it is, and started with microcontrollers, used in many things. That is where RISC-V will and is starting to get traction, but scaling beyond that, whilst could be faster than ARM's history, it's not as clear-cut as many foresee.
The ability to modify the design for your application and be able to apply a plethora of cores where they are needed at only the cost of silicon area.
Apple has been moving their management cores on their M-series parts from Arm to RV and they have an architectural license.
Everyone has an architectural license for RISC-V, you can add your own instructions, change the mix of available instructions. A whole parametric RV32 or RV64 will be available on every node at every fab.
This move by Arm is absolutely to block RPI from moving to RISC-V. They have mindshare and distribution.
Art is not just about no limit, but what you do with the limitation including illuminating there is a limit. Not just about beyond it but of course you could.
There was tons of guides, tutorials, etc. when I got it, which I think was close to launch? The os image was already made, tutorials on how to set it up, use ssh, setup a basic webserver, etc were all there at or very near launch.
---
Software support is almost never an issue for sbc's, and because they run linux, there's a significant amount of resources of how to use them.
Usually they fall apart because they don't have on-going software/firmware support the way RPI has always had a very well supported, and up-to-date linux image ready to flash.
---
Although I will admit I think far more packages were compiled for arm back then compared to riscv packages today.
You can track the debian build progress here:
past two weeks: https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-week-big.png
past quarter: https://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph-quarter-big.png
0. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starfive/visionfive-2
It will take 3-5 years for RISC-V to catch up with ARM in any way that is meaningful for the Raspberry Pi's target segments. Maybe some industrial applications, but I really doubt we'll see RISC-V silicon with enough clout and power efficiency for a long while.
> The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B was released in June 2019
The math checks out.
Software-wise, RISC-V is way behind as well.
Not that many orders of magnitude. There's RISC-V hardware (actual boards for sale) that's faster than RK3588 (thus RPi as well) coming in 2024.
This includes the SG2380 Oasis board[0] in 10 months, and a possibly earlier JH8100-based visionfive 3 board.
And we aren't even talking about large implementations like Tenstorrent Ascalon (expected to be competitive with Zen5, M4).
0. https://forum.sophgo.com/t/about-the-sg2380-oasis-category/3...
x86 ARM RISC-V
Introduction 8008 (1974) ARM1 (1985) Raven-1 (2011)
first OoO NexGen NX586 (1994) ARM A9 (2007) BOOM (2015)
first multicore AMD Athlon X2 (2005) Nvidia Tegra 2 (2010) EOS16? (2012)
first 64-bit AMD Athlon64 (2003) Samsung Exanos 5 (2013) Western Digital SweRV? (2017?)
Bleeding Edge -- Apple M1 (2020) TBD (Tenstorrent Ascalon 2024?)
x86 was 20 years to OoO, ARM was 22 years, and RISC-V was just 4 years.
x86 was 31 years to dual-core, ARM was 25 years, and RISC-V was just 1 year.
x86 was 29 years to 64-bit systems, ARM was 28 years, and RISC-V was at most 6 years.
ARM took 35 years to catch up to x86. RISC-V seems set to do that in 13-14 years (if you only start counting when RISC-V had privilege systems, that's like 5-6 years and if you only count since vectors were added, it's just 3-4 years.
Put everything on a graph and RISC-V is blowing the doors off with how fast it has gone from unknown to next-gen tech.
Don't get me wrong, being open is doing wonders as well but just in general, nowadays fabbing ASICs (and the experience that goes with it) is so much more accessible to smaller, less risk averse players than when ARM (or x86) really started getting big.
Both x86 and ARM had to 'ride the wave' when that tech came along.
RISC-V otoh can pick up the result of those advancements, piece it together for a new ISA, and go. No waiting-until-tech-advances other than the wait for design work & prepping those designs for mass-production. Both of which can take considerable time. But not decades.
It's possible that some of those 5 years and some hundreds of $100M have been already spent under wraps by Quallcom or whoever else, though. SiFive fiasco recently may prove it isn't easy even if the dollars are there.
The first large hardware showcasing this is arriving in 2024, including Tenstorrent Ascalon, expected to be competitive with Zen5.
It's smart marketing. And yes, RPis going to RISC-V would eventually be damaging to ARM all out of proportion to the number of RPis sold.
Were I ARM I'd be far more concerned about a RISC-V spin off of the pico than the mainline pi devices.
Milk-V Duo[0] is where it's at, now.
Alternatively, the BeagleV-Fire[0] FPGA got you covered, but that's not as cheap.
0. https://www.beagleboard.org/blog/2023-11-02-beaglev-fire-ann...
That is a form of FUD that unfortunately shows up very often.
In reality, all known application processors (e.g. made to run a software stack based on Linux), follow the RVA profile[0] spec.
So do all Linux binary distributions known to support RISC-V. As well as the BSDs.
Specifically, they currently target RVA20, and thus also support RVA22.
> In reality, all known application processors (e.g. made to run a software stack based on Linux), follow the RVA profile[0] spec.
What profile does Greenwave's GAP8 conform to?
> Specifically, they currently target RVA20, and thus also support RVA22.
Anything targeting RVA20 wouldn't be forward compatible. RVA22 added vector and floating-point extensions that a processor conforming to RVA20 wouldn't necessarily have or that wouldn't necessarily be compatible with RVA22.
That's a microcontroller, and designed to run your custom code. Regardless, it does conform to RVI20 profile, and supports the optional M and C extensions. It will thus run RVI20 code w/o issue.
>or that wouldn't necessarily be compatible with RVA22.
If not clear enough, all RVA20 code runs unmodified on RVA22.
It is specifically marketed as an application processor.
> If not clear enough, all RVA20 code runs unmodified on RVA22.
Sorry I misunderstood what you were saying. I thought you meant software targeting RVA22 would run on a RVA20 processor.
However there might be a bit of personal bias there, from the long time exposure to the Broadcom binary wireless driver (wl).
Hi Jeff.
So they need to have hardware their competitors can't replicate, which means Broadcom or custom silicon. My guess is the latter is where it will eventually go, since they already dipped their toe in the water with the Pico.
"RP1 is our I/O controller for Raspberry Pi 5, designed by the same team at Raspberry Pi that delivered the RP2040 microcontroller, and implemented, like RP2040, on TSMC’s mature 40LP process. It provides two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 interfaces; a Gigabit Ethernet controller; two four-lane MIPI transceivers for camera and display; analogue video output; 3.3V general-purpose I/O (GPIO); and the usual collection of GPIO-multiplexed low-speed interfaces (UART, SPI, I2C, I2S, and PWM). A four-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface provides a 16Gb/s link back to BCM2712.
Under development since 2016, RP1 is by a good margin the longest-running, most complex, and (at $15 million) most expensive program we’ve ever undertaken here at Raspberry Pi. It has undergone substantial evolution over the years, as our projected requirements have changed: the C0 step used on Raspberry Pi 5 is the third major revision of the silicon. And while its interfaces differ in fine detail from those of BCM2711, they have been designed to be very similar from a functional perspective, ensuring a high degree of compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi devices."
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
The Pi’s A and B naming scheme for instance harks back to the Beeb B.
The A in Arm originally stood for “Acorn”, the company behind both the BBC Micro and Arm processors.
The Beeb was also the host computer used to develop the first Arm processors.
So there’s something rather nice about this investment. It feels like a natural fit.
And, in fact, the BBC Model A.
As with the Pi models, the biggest difference between the BBC computer models A & B was RAM: the A having 16KiB and the B 32KiB. There were other differences too, but these were not as significant to many: a particular chip that provided IO, and the external ports that cam with it, were only available on the B or an user-upgraded A, and this also provided a couple of timers that one or two bits of software used (so there was some software that was model-B only despite fitting in the smaller RAM of tjhe model-A).
Complete speculation, but perhaps with an investment from Arm both sides would be more comfortable with closer collaboration and more tailored Arm cores. Plus, RPi probably need the capital.
Edit: And I did reply to the substance of your comment: I think it's above all about keeping them away from ris-v, not flexibility and collaboration (though of course closer collaboration means keeping them away from risc-v). Jeez...
I've removed the snark but perhaps it's better to engage with the substance of a comment.
Edit : You didn’t engage with the substance of the comment which was about RPi’s perspective but instead made an unrelated comment about why Arm would do the investment.
Could be fatal to have RPi create a low-entry barrier for a cheap standardized RISC-V architecture, accumulate alot of (student) developers and applications, and then have the same architecture offered in high-performance (datacenter) hardware as well...
I would like something that has NVMe and non-USB connected networking, with sufficient cooling, with a good keyboard. GPIO should still be exposed (like on the Pi 400). I don't expect a PCIe expansion slot, basically I just want a beefed up Pi 400 to be a true BBC Micro successor. (And for the love of all that's good and holy, proper HDMI ports. And a proper keyboard, not a laptop keyboard like on the Pi 400. Heck, steal the Amiga 600 design.)
It's a delight to use.
Raspberry Pi Ltd - No.08207441 (the one who received this "investment")
Raspberry Pi Foundation - No.06758215 (registered charity)
Raspberry Pi Foundation North America - (registered 501(c)(3))
[Edit: The link wasn't in another comment, was searched for: https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda... ]
RISC-V Summit 2023 is next week[0].
Like every year, many announcements are expected. And they have, so far, never failed to be higher profile than the previous years' Summit.
I know lots of folks are suggesting that this is aimed at preventing Raspberry Pi from going RISK-V and they're probably not wrong.
But, on the other hand, every single Raspberry Pi to date has been Arm-based, and they seem to be fairly conservative in terms of backwards compatibility. Even today, the recommended Raspberry Pi OS on https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/ is 32-bit in order to ensure compatibility with every model they've ever made. (The Pi Zero is the only model they still sell that is 32-bit only.)
The only places where I think RISC-V might have been likely were future iterations of the Pi Pico, or ancillary chips like the RP1. And that is probably less likely with this investment.
Not true. They're still selling all their previous models.
I should have added "to the public" - I don't believe any B2C vendors still stock the Pi 1 or original 32-bit version of the Pi 2.
Hopefully it’s not another two decades before we get totally open hardware platform as good as RaspPi has been
Raspberry Pi already missed the RISC-V train with the RPi5. It could very well have been the first board with Vector 1.0, but they did unfortunately not make that choice years ago, so we ended up with this RPi5 instead.
Even if RPi release an electronic RISC-V hardware, this foundation solidification would harm ARM on the long run.
[1] https://psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/
[2] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK/blob/master/examples/...
The rPi foundation doesn't care about the individual end users anymore. They make most of their money supporting commercial vendors. They're keeping up the appearance of being good to the little guy so they can keep their support ecosystem alive and well.
Do you have evidence to the contrary?
[0] - https://www.raspberrypi.com/success-stories/korg-synthesizer...
https://www.raspberrypi.com/app/uploads/2023/04/230329-Yodec...
Yoto Player is another example but I don't know how many Pi-based ones they shipped, I'd guess more than 10k but I don't know.
(I say this using a cm4 for image acquisition commercially. Because of the way our pipeline works, I skip the hardware encoder anyway - first, it's a complete pain in the ass to use, and second, it can't handle full-resolution images from a pi camera. We're slower than video because of the resolution, but still capture between 1fps and 1/10fps depending on configuration, with enough headroom to do some on-device image classification using tflite, rotation and JPEG compression, etc.)
Obviously, it would need benchmarks, but taking that post at its word, the 5 can transcode twice as fast in software as the 4b could do in hardware.
That doesn't mean some other hardware platform wouldn't be drastically better, I just don't get the extreme reaction about the 5 when compared to the 4.
I have several Pi's around the house that I use for various projects, and none of them have ever involved video encoding. The one thing I can think of where it might be beneficial is my plex server, but that's an x86 machine right now, and it'll probably stay that way.
Also are you saying that you've already switched to the Orange Pi 5? That's amazingly fast considering the RPi5 was launched less than 2 weeks ago.
Doesn't strike me as odd. Orange Pi 5 has been available for a relative long time.
After seeing the Raspberry Pi 5 they were holding on for is not worth it, they finally pulled the plug with Orange Pi 5.
Way to talk about emotional decisions while being bitter about some bad experience with another SBC.
I have personally had great experiences with other SBCs, and I'm not just talking VisionFive2, but ARM ones, over the years.
There's a lot of them, and it takes some care in choice. Insist on the few ones that have SoCs with good upstream support. There's also a tendency for good ones to come in series; the already named Orange Pi 5 has many predecessors, and established reputation.
And a friendly reminder below that Raspberry Pi does have its own dark history.
Be it Codec licenses to use the hardware acceleration, camera DRM, or hardware bugs.
Such as the USB protection dropping too much voltage on the first Pi, or the 2nd generation rebooting when exposed to light, or the third "+" models erratic ethernet behavior.
Or the main serial port suddenly not working, because now it's bluetooth's, and you have to use an alternative, unreliable one which baudrate scales with cpu clock. And that broken serial port staying broken despite RPi4 added more hardware serial ports.
Or RPi4 shipping w/o a heatsink, and throttling constantly until one is added.
And RPi5 still not supporting voltages above 5v via usb-pd, despite demanding more peak current than ever before.
Then there's people issues, like forgetting its good-for-society not-for-profit and focusing on making money. The "Pi 400", as well as prioritizing industry customers; it was really hard to get a Pi4 for a period of time spawning years.
I'm saying this despite I own all models, keep most of them in use still, and will likely get a rpi5 down the line, just to mess around, despite trying to move most of my computing to the standard RISC-V ISA.
That's fair.
> about some bad experience with another SBC.
I didn't say one bad experience. I've tried a load of those "pi-killer" SBCs that have universally crap software support. Normally requiring some old version of Debian/Ubuntu and even then with some of their "killer" features broken. It is good to see Orange Pi actually doing some work there, maybe it is time to try again with an alternate board.
I am bitter because it's frustrating that unlike hardware bugs that are actually hard to fix once you've started shipping, software can be updated. But none of the other companies invest in that. It feels like they are just on to the next version, desperate to keep ahead on features. Compared to Raspberry Pi, where for example, things like the Pi 4 throttling issue are fixed/improved down the line.
> RPi5 still not supporting voltages above 5v via usb-pd
I didn't see this one. Do you have details?
Like the previous boards, it doesn't support usb power beyond 5v. This time it's usb-pd proper, but still has that limit.
So It's the same as usual. Most usb supplies out there (majorly phone chargers) won't output much current at 5v, only at higher voltages, thus you need to buy a known-good supply especially just so that the rpi is happy.
And, as happened the last time, the old one is probably not good enough, as current requirements went up.
Panfrost team is doing good work for GPU drivers for the RK3588 boards, but I expect that to take longer
Then again, I feel the same way for remaining ARM, when they could very well have, with a similar timeline, moved to RISC-V RVA22+V. Many do not understand this now, but will in the coming months when VisionFive3 and other RVA22+V boards launch.
Such a wasted opportunity for Raspberry Pi.
Look how long it takes them to bump their software releases. And you want to throw an entirely new architecture in the mix? Why? I don't understand how you can be shocked by the decision to stick with what works and sells (very well). Which of their goals would be furthered by taking this significant risk?