StarFive Technology Category - CNX Software

June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

A RISC-V laptop or mini PC with Rockchip RK3588-class performance may be coming soon

Mark Himelstein, Chief Technology Officer, RISC-V International, and Dr. Philipp Tomsich, Chief Technologist & Founder, VRULL GmbH hinted that we may see a RISC-V laptop in 2022 in a presentation entitled “From Technology to Product – Maturing the RISC-V Ecosystem” with one of the slides showing what could be a RISC-V laptop prototype and The Register suspected it might come from the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) since it was planning to build 2,000 RISC-V laptops by the end of 2022. But there’s at least one more potential RISC-V laptop project coming our way with StarFive asking users to fill out a survey about a laptop, mini PC, or development board/SBC based on a RISC-V SoC with performance comparable to Rockchip RK3588 or MediaTek MT8192 octa-core Cortex-A76/Cortex-A55 processors. The hardware and software specifications of the device will depend on the answers to the survey. First, it’s […]

May 17, 2022October 21, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

Ubuntu Kylin 20.04 OS works on RISC-V hardware

China-developed Ubuntu Kylin 20.04 is now supporting RISC-V architecture with an image for HiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard, and work will be done on an unnamed Starfive SBC that should be the VisionFive board with a GPUless JH7100 dual-core RISC-V SoC or an upgraded version with JH7110 SoC featuring an Imagination IMG BXE-4-32 GPU. You may have read recent reports about China asking government entities, including state-owned enterprises (SOE), to replace foreign hardware and software within a two-year period. So that means avoiding systems based on Intel and AMD processors, so working on RISC-V open architecture makes perfect sense, since over time, Chinese manufacturers should be able to make RISC-V SoCs and PCs based on those processors, albeit probably not within the next two years at any significant scale. Ubuntu Kylin 20.04 RISC-V, as well as the newly released Ubuntu Kylin 22.04 x86, can be found on the English download page […]

April 24, 2022April 24, 2022 by Sponsored Post - 7 Comments

StarFive releases Perf tool for highest performance RISC-V IP Dubhe (Sponsored)

As a StarFive Technology in-house developed RISC-V 64-bit ultra-high-performance core, Dubhe showcases the best performance RISC-V CPU core IP yet. It utilizes the latest RISC-V instruction set which includes RV64GC, bit operation extension (B), vector extension (V) V1.0, and hypervisor extension H (Hypervisor), making it ideal for high-performance computing. To pair with the Dubhe performance core, StarFive is now releasing “StarFive Perf Performance Profiling Tool”. StarFive has made Perf compatible with the hardware performance monitor (HPM) and micro-architecture events at the hardware level. Perf provides a reliable performance verification platform that not only facilitates customers to further discuss the Dubhe technical specifications but also accelerates the implementation of high-performance applications with RISC-V processors. Perf is an open-source and Linux-based performance analyzing tool capable of providing performance monitoring of the hardware events, tracepoints, firmware events, and dynamic probes. With the Perf profiling tool, we can monitor the performance of the predefined […]

December 31, 2021December 31, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Year 2021 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics

As per tradition, we’ll look back at what happened during the year in the last post, and see what 2022 may have in store, plus the usual statistics from CNX Software website. The biggest story of 2021 has to be the worsening of semiconductors shortages with extremely long lead times, prices of some components going up multiple folds, constant complaints on Twitter about availability and prices. I think I even saw a website, hopefully misconfigured, showing an estimated availability of a specific STM32 MCU in 2037. This also gave rise to opportunities and board redesigns, with MotorComm Ethernet chips replacing some Realtek chips in SBCs such as NanoPi R2C and Orange Pi R1S Plus LTS, and CH9102F showing up as a replacement for CP2104 in some IoT boards. We also got some interesting Arm processors, but sadly the high-expected Rockchip RK3588 got delayed by another year, although it’s getting really […]

November 27, 2021May 27, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

VisionFive V1 RISC-V Linux SBC resurrects BeagleV StarFive single board computer

Last summer we reported that BeagleV StarFive RISC-V SBC would not be manufactured, but all was not lost as StarFive would collaborate with Radxa to make a new single board computer based on their JH7100 dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processor. But thanks to a report on Heise and extra photos acquired by CNX Software, we now have more details about the board that mostly comes with the same features as the BeagleV StarFive, but a completely different layout that brings all the main ports to one side of the board. VisionFive V1 specifications: SoC – StarFive JH7100 Vision SoC with: Dual-core Sifive U74 RISC-V processor @ 1.5 GHz with 2MB L2 cache Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision NVDLA Engine 1 core (configuration 2048 MACs @ 800MHz – 3.5 TOPS) Neural Network Engine (1024MACs @ 500MHz – 1 TOPS) VPU – H.264/H.265 decoder up to 4Kp60, dual-stream decoding up to 4Kp30 […]

May 3, 2021May 4, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

RISC-V International to give away 1,000 RISC-V development boards

The best way for a new platform to get good software support is to bring hardware into the hands of developers. That’s exactly what RISC-V International is doing by inviting developers to sign up for a RISC-V developer board sponsored by RISC-V and contributing members. There are 1,000 boards on offer with 1GB to 16GB RAM depending on the target project from five companies and organizations namely Allwinner, Beagleboard.org, SiFive, Microchip Technology (previously Microsemi), and RIOS. Here are the stated goals of the giveaway: Spur innovation Enable new opportunities for the next generation of developers to work with the RISC-V ISA Provide a platform For testing To write programs that run on RISC-V Develop software Integrate existing software stacks Optimize ecosystem software Share feedback on the product such as ease to integrate software stacks, develop and test extensions, etc. The company did not provide an exact list of development board […]

April 30, 2021April 30, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Antmicro ARVSOM offers StarFive JH71x0 RISC-V processor, Raspberry Pi CM4 compatibility

The Linux capable BeagleV SBC, now called “BeagleV Starlight”, was announced last January with a StarFive JH7100/JH7110 64-bit RISC-V processor, and developers and beta users have just started to get their hand on the board in recent days. But there’s another StarFive JH71x0 hardware in the works with Antmicro ARVSOM. The system-in-module will feature the dual-core RISC-V processor, and be compatible with Raspberry Pi CM4, and by extension Antmicro’s Scalenode server-oriented baseboard. The company did not provide the complete specifications for the module, but based on public information available, Antmicro ARVSOM should feature the following: SoC – StarFive JH7100 Vision SoC: RISC-V U74 dual-core with 2MB L2 cache @ 1.5 GHz Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision NVDLA Engine 1 core (configuration 2048 MACs @ 800MHz – 3.5 TOPS) Neural Network Engine (1024MACs @ 500MHz – 1 TOPS) VPU – H.264/H.265 decoder up to 4Kp60, dual-stream decoding up to 2Kp30 […]

January 13, 2021July 31, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 22 Comments

$119+ BeagleV powerful, open-hardware RISC-V Linux SBC targets AI applications

Running Linux on RISC-V hardware is already possible, but you’d have a choice of low-end platforms like Kendryte K210 that’s not really practical for anything, or higher-end board like SiFive HiFive Unmatched or PolarBerry for which you’d have to spend several hundred dollars, or even over one thousand dollars to have a complete system. So an affordable, usable RISC-V Linux SBC is clearly needed. We previously wrote about an upcoming Allwinner RISC-V Linux SBC that will be mostly useful for camera applications without 3D GPU, and a maximum of 256MB RAM. But today, we have excellent news, as the BeagleBoard.org foundation, Seeed Studio, and Chinese fabless silicon vendor Starfive partnered to design and launch the BeagleV SBC (pronounced Beagle Five) powered by StarFive JH7100 dual-core SiFive U74 RISC-V processor with Vision DSP, NVDLA engine, and neural network engine for AI acceleration. BeagleV specifications: SoC – StarFive JH7100 Vision SoC with: […]