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Intel to invest $1 billion in foundry innovation, becomes RISC-V International member

Intel has just announced a $1 billion fund to support companies bringing innovations and new technologies to the foundry ecosystem. The company says the fund will prioritize investments in “capabilities that accelerate foundry customers’ time to market – spanning intellectual property (IP), software tools, innovative chip architectures, and advanced packaging technologies.” What’s interesting is that it does not only cover x86 architecture but also Arm and RISC-V, with a focus on the latter, as Intel has just become a Premier member of RISC-V International, and partnered with several companies offering RISC-V solutions including Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive, and Ventana Micro Systems. Intel’s Open Chiplet Platform Part of the investment will go to the Open Chiplet Platform offering a modular approach to chip design through chiplets with each block/chiplet customized for a particular function. This will allow designers to select the best IP and process technologies for a particular SoC. […]

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India goes RISC-V with VEGA processors

One of the main advantages of RISC-V architecture is that it is open, so any organization with the right skills can develop its own cores, and India’s government has taken up this opportunity with the Microprocessor Development Programme (MDP) helping develop VEGA RISC-V cores locally. Thanks to funding by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) managed to design five RISC-V processors ranging from a single-core 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller-class processor to a Linux capable quad-core 64-bit out-of-order processor. Key features of the five VEGA cores developed by the C-DAC: VEGA ET1031 – 32-bit single-core 3-stage in-order RV32IM processor with AHB/AXI4.bus, optional MMU, optional Debug VEGA AS1061 – 64-bit single-core 6-stage in-order RV64IMAFDC processor with 8KB D-cache, 8KB I-cache, FPU, AHB/AXI4 bus VEGA AS1161 – 64-bit single-core 16-stage pipeline out-of-order RV64IMAFDC processor with 32KB D-cache, 32KB I-cache, FPU, AHB/AXI4/ACE bus VEGA AS2161 […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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WCH CH32V307 RISC-V development board features 8 UART ports controlled over Ethernet

CH32V307V-EVT-R1 is a development board based on WCH CH32V307 RISC-V microcontroller with an Ethernet port, an USB Type-C port, and eight UART interfaces accessible through headers. As we noted in our article about CH583 Bluetooth 5.3 RISC-V microcontroller, WCH (Jiangsu Qin Heng) has started to share resources like datasheets and code samples through Github. They’ve done the same again for CH32V307 with schematics (PDF only), a datasheet in English, and firmware either bare metal or based on RT-Thread OS to control the eight serial interfaces over Ethernet. Let’s check CH32V305 and CH32V307 MCU specifications first: MCU core – WCH designed RISC-V4F 32-bit RISC-V core up to 144MHz FPU – Single-cycle multiplication and hardware division, hardware float point unit (FPU) ; Memory – Up to 64KB SRAM Storage – Up to 256KB Flash Networking – Gigabit Ethernet MAC, 10 Mbps PHY USB – 1x USB 2.0 OTG full-speed interface,  1x USB […]

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Tang Nano 9K FPGA board can emulate PicoRV32 RISC-V soft-core with all peripherals

Tang Nano 9K FPGA is the third board from Sipeed based on GOWIN FPGA following the original Tang Nano board with 1K LUT and Tang Nano 4K launched last year with GW1NSR-LV4C (aka GW1NSR-4C) FPGA offering 4068 logical units and 64 Mbit PSRAM, plus an Arm Cortex-M3 hard processor. As its name implies, the new board comes with 9K LUTs, as well as 64 Mbit PSRAM, 32 Mbit Flash, a micro SD card, and video I/O (HDMI, RGB LCD connector) that makes it suitable to run Verilog HDL code emulating a PicoRV32 RISC-V soft-core with all peripherals. Tang Nano 9K FPGA board specifications: FPGA – GOWIN LittleBee GW1NR-9/GW1NR-LV9 8,640 logical units (LUTs) 6,480 flip-flop 17,280 bits shadow SRAM (SSRAM) 486 Kbit block SRAM (BSRAM) 64 Mbit PSRAM 608 Kbit user flash 2x PLL Up to 276x user I/O Storage – 32 Mbit SPI flash. MicroSD card socket Display I/F HDMI […]

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Linux 5.16 Release – Main Changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.16: Not a lot here since -rc8, which is not unexpected. We had that extra week due to the holidays, and it’s not like we had lots of last-minute things that needed to be sorted out. So this mainly contains some driver fixes (mainly networking and rdma), a cgroup credential use fix, a few core networking fixes, a couple of last-minute reverts, and some other random noise. The appended shortlog is so small that you might as well scroll through it. This obviously means that the merge window for 5.17 opens tomorrow, and I’m happy to say I already have several pending early pull requests. I wish I had even more, because this merge window is going to be somewhat painful due to unfortunate travel for family reasons. So I’ll be doing most of it on the road on a laptop […]

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Intel Mobileye EyeQ Ultra RISC-V processor targets Level 4 autonomous driving

Let’s carry on with Intel’s CES 2022 news, but with a twist as Mobileye EyeQ Ultra does not include any x86 cores, but instead, the automotive processor features 12 RISC-V cores, Arm GPU and DSP, and aims to bring Level 4 autonomous driving to cars thanks notably to a 176 TOPS AI accelerator. The company says EyeQ Ultra packs the performance of 10 EyeQ5s in a single package, with the single chip solution avoiding the power consumption and costs related to integrating multiple SoCs together.   Intel Mobileye EyeQ Ultra specifications highlights: CPU – 12 RISC-V CPU cores  (24 threads) GPU – Unnamed Arm GPU DSP – Unnamed Arm DSP SIMD cores VLIW cores Coarse grained reconfigurable array (CGRA) cores CNN accelerator clusters Two sensing subsystems One camera-only system Radar and Lidar combined system 5-nanometer process technology Mobileye provides both the chip and software with for instance high-definition map and […]

Intel Arc Graphics Technology
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Sipeed Lichee RV RISC-V module gets $5+ carrier board with HDMI and USB ports, optional WiFi

Sipeed introduced the Lichee RV Allwinner D1 Linux RISC-V board going for just $17 with 512MB RAM last month. While with a USB-C port it could be used as a standalone part, its dual M.2 connector makes it more like a module and we noted a tiny carrier board was in the works at the time. The baseboard is now available and known as the Lichee RV Dock adding HDMI and USB ports, as well as a 40-pin GPIO header for just $5, or $8 if you’d like to get Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity through a Realtek RTL8723DS module. Sipeed Lichee RV Dock specifications: Supported system-on-module (SoM) – Lichee RV module with Allwinner D1 RISC-V processor @ 1 GHz, 512MB DDR3, MicroSD card slot, and USB Type-C OTG port Storage – Optional SPI flash Display interfaces HDMI port up to 4Kp30 Optional RGB interface for up to 720p30 […]

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CH583 RISC-V microcontroller supports Bluetooth 5.3 LE

Following up on the CH572 RISC-V BLE microcontroller with 10KB SRAM, WCH has now introduced the CH583 RISC-V microcontroller with 32KB SRAM, 1 MB flash, and support for the latest Bluetooth 5.3 LE standard. The new microcontroller also offers a wide range of peripherals with two USB host/device interfaces, up to 40 GPIOs, four UART, two SPI, one I2C, up to 14 ADC interfaces, and more. WCH also offers CH581 and CH582 microcontrollers with a different minimum input voltage, less storage (256KB for CH581) and/or peripherals. CH581, CH582, CH583 specifications: MCU core – 32-bit RISC processor WCH RISC-V4A with RV32IMAC instruction set Memory – 32 KB SRAM Storage – 512KB non-volatile storage FlashROM: 448KB user application program memory area CodeFlash 32KB user non-volatile data memory area DataFlash 24KB system boot program memory area BootLoader 8KB system non-volatile configuration information memory area InfoFlash BLE Connectivity Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) v5.3 Integrated […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC