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(Opinion) open RISC-V dev boards; an emerging market niche?

4 points by mouse_ ↗ HN
RISC-V is clearly entering its time to shine, however every board I have seen come to market is laden with flaws that effectively designate it e-waste out of the box, the largest being proprietary graphics chipsets that will likely never see a kernel update, considering these companies are coming out with new boards every month (or less!) and surely do not have the time to dedicate to maintenance of their ever growing backlog.

AMD's RX 6400 is a low-profile, low power RDNA2 graphics chipset that, as a PCI-e card, can generally be had for less than $70. The first RDNA2 RISC-V dev board available to purchase for less than $300 will be an instantaneous buy for me, and likely many others. Whoever capitalizes on this market first will surely secure a longstanding foothold in the open hardware community.

2 comments

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brucehoult
RDNA2 is a software issue, not hardware. Simply put, the driver is very unusual in that it uses floating point, which is generally not used in the kernel or other drivers. Supporting it is a simple matter of having the kernel save and restore FPU state for kernel code, not only when switching between user programs.

This was first done by Rene Rebe in July 2021, and it is upstream in mainline Linux 6.10.

https://www.hackster.io/news/rene-rebe-patches-the-linux-ker...

The HiFive Unmatched has been around since early 2021, is fully documented, supported by many OSes, does not have a proprietary GPU, has a PCIe x16 connector with 8 lanes active, was $665 but is now $299, which is under your $300.

https://mou.sr/3Xxcrb9

I'm sure they will appreciate your order.

The StarFive quad core JH7110 and SpacemiT octa core K1/M1 SoCs also support PCIe (though not as many lanes). Most of the boards bring this out as M.2, which you can add an adaptor to a standard PCIe socket to, but the Pine64 Star64 ($89.99 with 8 GB RAM, JH7110, 16 GB SPI flash, connector for eMMC module) and Milk-V Jupiter (SpacemiT K1/M1, from $59.90 with 4 GB RAM, $115 with 16 GB) have an standard PCIe connector.

https://pine64.com/product/star64-model-a-8gb-single-board-c...

https://arace.tech/products/milk-v-jupiter-spacemit-m1-k1-oc...

mouse_
> The HiFive Unmatched has been around since early 2021, is fully documented, supported by many OSes, does not have a proprietary GPU, has a PCIe x16 connector with 8 lanes active, was $665 but is now $299, which is under your $300.

Did not know this, thanks! I do wish it was at least PCIe 4.0 (RX 6400 has 64-bit memory, which is a bit choked on 3.0), but that's a minor gripe.