People aren't interested in a board with a specific processor, but a platform which is well supported, now and in the future. The Raspberry Pi Foundation stands alone in this regard and will always trump its competition.

Indeed, and riscv and its possibly lower license fees matter for producers, but for endusers that only factors if the price is really lower (and on small orders it probably won't matter)

Might be useful as a dev board for people planning a RISC-V embedded system

Yup. There's rather more to supporting an ecology than aping the GPIO pinouts.

On one hand it's good that one can plug in existing hardware (intended for the Pi) rather than needing new custom stuff.

But on the other hand it's a bit meaningless without the software/drivers and documentation to back it up.

And, of course, there's the price to consider.

Unless you want to actually buy an RPI, at which point the Pi Foundation fails miserably.

I've been on the waiting list with EVERY RPi retailer in the UK for over a year now. The Pi is a lie. It does not exist.

But if you don't want to actually buy the hardware and are fine with thier dubious hiring practices then yeah, they're great.

Due to, some might say massively flawed pandemic policies, supply chains are buggered. For chips this means that low volume, low margin chips like the Broadcoms used in the RPis that supply is severely constrained, especially if you are intending to sell at a fixed price, while car and consumer electronic manufacturers refill their inventories. Supplies are improving across the board but it probably won't be until the end of the year before things get more or less back to normal.

I think the Richard M Stallmans of the world are very interested. And possibly curious developers, especially those in the bare metal niche.

But no, these are not substantial groups.

The architecture definition of Risc V is open. The CPU design itself not necessarily.

RMS probably will want a complete open design, but that will probably preclude the faster RISCV's.

Probably true, who's going to pay for you to continue designing chips if your secret sauce isn't secret? It's not the greatest business model. I suppose some fabs with their own design labs could afford to do this. But it's difficult to see why they would want the overhead and what the benefit for them would be.

= The Raspberry Pi Foundation stands alone in this regard and will always trump its competition.

Except Raspberry PI computers have little to do with the Raspberry Pi Foundation these days. Having people buying them in the belief they are directly benefiting a charity has probably been very profitable for the multi-million dollar business and its well paid staff.

Having just seen the price of the Tinker boards, I don't think the Raspberry Pi has much to worry about.

True to a point. But for embedded applications like robot control, having CAN is a very nice feature, and we don't need the display port.

The price for a CAN 'hat' for a Raspberry Pi is shocking, and it's only an i2c/SPI-connected MCP25xx with very poor performance compared to a native CAN interface on the SoC.

Dual gigabit Ethernet ports is also a game changer. Then you can swap CAN for EtherCAT for -serious- robot control. Dedicated EtherCAT controllers cost thousands..

I hadn't thought of that but that's really neat. An EtherCAT driver for this would be awesome; one interface for networking, the other for control. It's curious, in a way, that it's running Linux and not FreeRTOS, which would be a more useful OS for robotics etc I think (although Yocto seems to have decent support for PREEMPT_RT, it's always still a pain to actually make something do what you want it to in RT).

I would love to see a Zephyr port for it actually.

If you're not familiar with [1]Zephyr , it's kind of a halfway point between FreeRTOS and Linux. It's a fully real-time OS with bare-metal interrupt support, but it has a Linux-style device driver model, with DeviceTree and Kconfig.

RiscV is a supported architecture but the Tinker board is not on the [2]list yet. It shouldn't be too much work to add it, though!

The closest board on there is the [3]BeagleV StarLight JH7100

[1] https://zephyrproject.org

[2] https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/riscv/index.html

[3] https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/boards/riscv/beaglev_starlight_jh7100/doc/index.html

Shouldn't have much trouble running FreeRTOS. Just need to port it to the particular processor. Shouldn't take too long. There is a generic port for RISC-V already.

Yes, well, blame the article for the misleading comparison. Difficult to beat the R Pi for general tinkering devices. But for prototyping specific domains things might be different.

Most people won't care about the architecture, as long as it's well supported, and it won't affect the end price, either. ASUS has possibly switched archs purely because that's what is available at the moment in what is still a highly constrained market for low-end silicon.

But, it doesn't matter how much cheaper Raspberry Pi boards are if you can't get them...

With a 1 Ghz single core processor this does not come close to the Raspberry Pi 4 (or 3 or 3+). I have included a quick overview of its specs and add that it is priced close enough to the Raspberry Pi 4 to considered a real competitor. I recently bought one but have not yet begun to work with it as I have a long backlog of projects. I do plan to move it up on the project list and start using it soon.

Specifications listed for the VisionFive 2 SBC include:

Processor System:

StarFive JH7110 4 core 64-bit SoC w/ RV64GC (up to 1.5GHz)

Memory/Storage:

Up to 8GB LPDDR4

eMMC storage socket

1x M.2 M-Key for SSD

QSPI Flash

1x Micro SD card slot

Connectivity:

2x GbE RJ45 ports

Bluetooth V4.2 BR/EDR, Bluetooth LE

Display:

1x HDMI 2.0

1x 4-lane MIPI-DSI port (up to 2K@30fps)

1x 2-lane MIPI-DSI port

Camera:

MIPI CSI (up to 4K@30fps)

USB:

2x USB 2.0

2x USB 3.0

I/O Interfaces:

40-pin GPIO header

Other Features:

1x Reset button

Debug pin headers

Power:

5V (via USB Type-C with PD, up to 30W)

5V (via GPIO Power in)

PoE (supports Power over Ethernet)

Dimensions:

100 x 72mm

I thought the consensus was that it was 80% performance of a Pi 4, with a better GPU... But anyway.

Look at the Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A come to that - 2000 of them will be shipping in a fortnight's time. It's got the T1520 SOM based around the open sourced T-Head C910, with the .7 Vector extension. Said to have the performance of a top flight 2016 smartphone - sufficient processing power to do lightweight computing.

I don't see how a single core 1 GHz CPU can get close to 80% of the 4 core 1.5 GHz Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. Can you expand on how this is done?

Can you bit bang all 40 GPIO pins using DMA at high frequency (say 100MHz) with a mechanism that prevents any interrupts being serviced during the DMA transfer?

And what about the price...?

$100.

Not quite the same as a RPI.

I didn't say it was. I said it was close. Last time I looked the retail price of the 8 GiB Raspberry Pi 4 was around $80 and I haven't seen one below $100 for over a year (?) now. I did read that they were supposed to be increasing production after they got some supply chain issues fixed but they are still not available in the US from the normal retailers. It is still well below the price of the Tinker 5 and has 4 times the number (and faster) cores and 8 times the amount of RAM.

What is the purpose of this?

It seems like they just wanted a competing product to RPi in their portfolio, without giving much thought what people actually need.

Apart from MCUs (that there are still shortages of), there is not much in the market that would offer a ton of I/O with DMA, timers and realtime capabilities.

RPi offers a lot of processing power, but it is usable in a very narrow scope. You can drive a few peripherals or connect something through USB, but that's boring.

Looking forward to the first decent open RiscV routers, NAS and combos, hopefully keep costs down while leaving them open to community development, change radios, storage, whatever. ARMs still seem to be too locked down by the big boys. propriety hardware/code.