Category: SpacemIT

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments on Banana Pi BPI-CM6 – A SpacemiT K1 RISC-V system-on-module compatible with Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 carrier boards

Banana Pi BPI-CM6 – A SpacemiT K1 RISC-V system-on-module compatible with Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 carrier boards

Banana Pi BPI-CM6 and carrier board

Banana Pi BPI-CM6 system-on-module (SoM) is powered by a SpacemiT K1 octa-core RISC-V processor and compatible with most carrier boards for the Raspberry Pi CM4 or CM5 modules. It ships with 8GB LPDDR4 and 16GB eMMC flash by default, a Gigabit Ethernet PHY, and a WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 4.1 wireless module. It exposes most interfaces through three 100-pin board-to-board connectors with HDMI 1.4, MIPI DSI, three MIPI CSI, five PCIe 2.1 lanes, USB 3.2/2.0 interfaces, and more. While it can work with Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 carrier boards using two of the B2B connectors, the company also designed the BPI-CM6 IO carrier board to make full use of all the interfaces, especially the PCIe lanes. Banana Bi BPI-CM6 SoM Let’s check the module itself first. Banana Pi BPI-CM6 specifications: SoC – SpacemIT K1 CPU – 8-core X60 RISC-V (RV64GCVB) processor @ 1.6 GHz (roughly Cortex-A55 equivalent) GPU – Imagination IMG […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments on Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 – International deals, coupons, and events

Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 – International deals, coupons, and events

AliExpress Black Friday 2025

Like every year since 2014, I’ll list a few international deals for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, as many CNX Software readers cannot benefit from promotions on Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday events, which will take place from November 20 to December 1. I’ve gathered various deals, discount coupon codes, and events from relevant manufacturers of single board computers, MCU development boards, mini PCs, Smart Home devices, and DIY products, as well as popular online stores, including AliExpress, Banggood, and others. AliExpress Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 event AliExpress sales event for Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025 has just started and will last until December 3, 2025 (although I can see until November 29 and December 4 in some places). You can use some of the coupons on the screenshot above, or some alternative coupon codes for the US and some other countries (excluding DE, RU, […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Linux 6.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.17 changelog

Linux 6.17 has just been released on LKML: No huge surprises this past week, so here we are, with kernel 6.17 pushed out and ready to go. Below is the shortlog for just the last week – not the full 6.17 release – as usual. It’s not exciting, which is all good. I think the biggest patch in there is some locking fixes for some bluetooth races that could cause use-after-free situations. Whee – that’s about as exciting as it gets. Other than that, there’ the usual driver fixlets (GPU and networking dominate as usual, but “dominate” is still pretty small), there’s some minor random other driver updates, some filesystem noise, and core kernel and mm. And some selftest updates. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.18 will open tomorrow, and I already have four dozen pull requests pending. Thanks to the proactive people – you know who […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments on Linux 6.16 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.16 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.16 release arm linux mips

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.16 on LKML: It’s Sunday afternoon, and the release cycle has come to an end. Last week was nice and calm, and there were no big show-stopper surprises to keep us from the regular schedule, so I’ve tagged and pushed out 6.16 as planned. It’s worth noting that the upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me: I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I’m spending about half the month traveling. That means that I will try very hard to get most of the merge window done the first week before my travels start, and I already ended upgiving a heads-up on that to the people who tend to send me the most pull requests. […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments on Three high-performance RISC-V processors to watch in H2 2025: UltraRISC UR-DP1000, Zhihe A210, and SpacemIT K3

Three high-performance RISC-V processors to watch in H2 2025: UltraRISC UR-DP1000, Zhihe A210, and SpacemIT K3

UR-DP1000 Block Diagram

Some high-performance RISC-V processors are in the pipeline for the rest of the year 2025, namely UltraRISC UR-DP1000, Zhihe A210, and SpacemIT K3. We currently have limited information about each of those processors, but let’s see what information we can gather from the web, mostly as a result of the recent RISC-V Summit in China. UltraRISC UR-DP1000  – Octa-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC The first SoC is the UR-DP1000 octa-core from UltraRISC (the website loads slowly, and I could not find anything about the UR-DP1000 there). It will be used in Shenzhen Milk-V Technology’s Titan mini-ITX motherboard, and Sipeed also posted the slide above on X. Preliminary UR-RP1000 specifications: CPU 8x 64-bit RISC-V UR-CP100 “RV64GCBHX” cores up to 2.0 GHz Two 4x core cluster design with 4MB L3 cache each, and a total of 16MB cache. SPECCPU2006 single-core INT @ 10.4/GHz; single-core FP @ 12/GHz Fully RVA22 compliant, and “Compliant with […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments on Ubuntu 25.10 release to mandate RVA23 profile, obsoleting most RISC-V hardware

Ubuntu 25.10 release to mandate RVA23 profile, obsoleting most RISC-V hardware

Orange Pi RV2 No Ubuntu 25.10 26.04

RISC-V is an open architecture standard that provides flexibility, and chip designers can add or remove instructions as they please to match their application requirements. That’s all great until complex software designed to run on multiple platforms is involved. That’s why for Linux and Android support, the RVA (RISC-V Application) profiles were created, so that every RISC-V SoC designed for those systems meets some minimal requirements and shared instructions, to which you would also add more if needed, as long as they don’t break the standard. The RISC-V association ratified the latest RVA23 profile for 64-bit RISC-V in October 2024, which notably mandates support for the vector and hypervisor extensions. OMGUbuntu also reports that Canonical has decided to raise the required RISC-V ISA profile family to RVA23, or more exactly RVA23U64, from RVA20 for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 release. In other words, going forward, Ubuntu will only be supported on […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments on $30+ Orange Pi R2S octa-core RISC-V router board features 2x 2.5GbE, 2x GbE, 2x USB ports

$30+ Orange Pi R2S octa-core RISC-V router board features 2x 2.5GbE, 2x GbE, 2x USB ports

Orange Pi R2S

Orange Pi has released two RISC-V boards so far: the Orange Pi RV with a StarFive JH7110 quad-core SoC, and the Orange Pi RV2 with a Ky X1 octa-core processor, either a clone of the SpacemIT K1/M1 SoC or one with different CPU markings. The third RISC-V board from the company, named Orange Pi R2S, also features a Ky X1 RISC-V SoC, but is designed for headless and networking applications with two 2.5GbE ports, two GbE ports, and two USB 3.0/2.0 ports, and not much else. Orange Pi R2S specifications: SoC – Ky X1 CPU – 8-core X60 RISC-V (RV64GCVB) processor @ 1.6 GHz GPU – Imagination IMG BXE-2-32 @ 819 MHz with support for OpenGL ES3.2, Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL 3.0; 20 GFLOPS VPU H.265, H.264, VP8, VP9, MPEG4, MPEG2 decoder up to 4K @ 60fps H.265, H.264, VP8, VP9 encoder up to 4K @ 30fps Support simultaneous processing 1080p60 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on Linux 6.15 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.15 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.15 release

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.15: So this was delayed by a couple of hours because of a last-minute bug report resulting in one new feature being disabled at the eleventh hour, but 6.15 is out there now. Apart from that final scramble, things looked pretty normal last week. Various random small fixes all over, with drivers as usual accounting for most of it. But we’ve got some bcachefs fixes, some core networking, and some mm fixes in there too. Nothing looks particularly scary. And this obviously means that the merge window opens tomorrow as usual, and I see the usual people being proactive and having sent me their pull requests. It’s memorial day tomorrow here in the US, but like the USPS, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” – nor memorial day – stops the merge window. [ Actually, thinking back […]

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