It wouldn't shock me if performance doubles over the next couple years. This chip is one of the first supports the RiscV Vector extension, so compilers have a lot of years of catch up to vectorize effectively.
Not bad at all, but the OpenWRT image still didn’t have Wi-Fi support a week or so ago, so I don’t know how good software support is going to be in the long run.
Don't suppose there's actually documentation for the CPU anywhere?
(I mean more than a tiny "datasheet" with a very high level overview and/or a pile of random Linux/uboot patches)
RISC-V going forward, one of the only beacons of hope in the silicon world.
I need one of such devices for my self-hosted services. And it will be time to port from C to assembly, really, because we have finally a CPU ISA which is 'sweet spot' balanced, standard, global, pushed forward with significant resources and without IP locks anywhere. No more developer/vendor lock-in via "the only compiler able to generate correct machine code", extremely hard to do planned obsolescence, etc, we need mainstream adoption NOW :)
The main blocker: how do I buy such device with a noscript/basic (x)html browser? And no way I use a credit card on a web site: would require well identified bank swift account, or wallet codes bought from local and physical currency terminals. I don't know of any local retailers I can buy such device from. Yep, the "web geniuses" at amazon (which supports wallet code) broke noscript/basic (x)html support a few years ago.
I use Privacy.com to get temporary credit cards, to avoid the hassle of compromised credit card numbers, although it doesn't stop various governments from tracking my transactions.
I've bought RISC-V SBCs from both Pine64.com and Arace.tech, and neither required I make an account. Arace.tech does require JavaScript to checkout, but Pine64.com does appear to work without it, although I didn't complete a transaction without it. Pine64.com also accepts USDC payments, but no other cryptocurrency.
It's pretty much the minimal cost for the form factor and accessories. It would be cool if they could make a $20 version with a lot less connectivity in a smaller form factor.
for tasks like face recognition and object detection, would this type of hardware have good performance in real world cases? or, what is the standard hardware that devs use for tasks like that?
Ubuntu will not support RISC-V CPUs without RVA23 support going further, so this is stuck on 24.04 forever. There is no official Debian image either, and the Ubuntu version uses fixed kernel 6.6.47 with no further updates (it is not even installed from a repo).
I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase.
Funny how software matters I bought a specific eink tablet and the lag and choppiness in drawing made me immediately sell it for something more well known.
Sucked too as I lost $300 but hopefully helps open source community anyway
It's actually worse than that, even getting updates kills the image. I did manage to work around it. but overall I don't consider it a platform for anything I would depend on. It's fun for experimentation, that is about it
Ubuntu is the worst of the Debian based Linux distributions. Give MX Linux a try. It's rarely evangelized, unlike other Linux distributions, but it has a surprisingly high user base, and for good reason. Everything it has added to Debian enhances it, and it doesn't try to promote any services, like Ubuntu does with Canonical's services.
Regardless of the Linux distribution, it's still way to early to get good support for RISC-V. Current products are good enough for general development, but RVA23 was ratified less than a year ago, and I don't know of any designs started after the ratification that have hit the market yet. Once that's the case, it should be easier to get universal support, but until then, every RISC-V SBC is a one-off development board.
I used to occasionally buy a single board computer ~10 to ~5 years ago.
Then I waited until SBC's reached the 32GB RAM level. The first such affordable and performant board was an Orange Pi 5+ or 5B (I should double check, may add a comment later).
I believe I wanted the Orange Pi 5+ but it was sold out, so I ordered and paid for the Orange Pi 5B (the 2 ethernet port variant) which was a bit more expensive but was still for sale. Both had 32GB RAM, my main requirement. There were multiple "flavors", with power adapters or with case or with memory card or eMMC etc. I chose the memory/eMMC version.
I sent a message to ask them to give me heads-up when they are about to ship mine, and then I was patient.
Then I waited, and waited, and waited.
Too patient, after a long while I start looking up on forums if other people are also waiting. I discover I am not the only one. So I take up contact again and ask when the board will be shipped.
They inform me the SBC is no longer manufactured, and offer me inflation-devalued currency.
I check which single board computers they still sell, and indeed they no longer sell the 5B variant, but now the 5+ is back in stock.
I ask them if they can just ship me the 5+ instead of the 5B. They refuse.
OK, I ask them how much I can pay extra so they ship me the 5+ instead of their unilaterally discontinued 5B.
They refuse.
A few months pass by. I ask again if they intend to ship the 5B as agreed, or the 5+ as a substitute.
So here comes the orange Lie:
They claim they shipped it, and provide a DHL link.
I first name (same as my father's) is German, even though I live in Belgium.
Their DHL link, is a shipment to somewhere in Germany, with a weight far below the weight of a single board computer, and which was delivered just minutes before their sending this message claiming shipped delivery.
I confront them that the weight of the SBC is advertised on their own site, and their DHL delivery link lists a value far below it, that I live in Belgium and the shipping address was in Belgium (I have 0 links to Germany), and that the timing of the delivery and their response message is so close it suggests people at customer support (presumably without arbitrary access to deliveries outside of the case) asked colleagues to let them know if a case pops up with a German delivery, so they can manually copy and paste bluff delivery of product X to customer Y as if it was my order to me into the message.
I confront them and ask them to answer a numbered list of questions.
They refuse to answer the questions (they can't without incriminating themselves), instead they offer me my money back.
Don't buy into the orange lie.
If you work for Orange Pie, feel free to msg me with a way to contact you, if you positively resolve my case I will remove this message.
The big ecosystem of SBCs confuses me a bit. Who is buying these?
The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer.
If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x86 PC or a Raspberry Pi for whatever project you've got. Any money saved buying one of these would be completely negated by the extra time taken to maintain it.
So who's the target market? Are there products out there built on these? Or are they mostly just shipped straight into desk drawers? How many of these do they actually ship?
Most of the SBCs are supported by fairly standard Linux distributions: Debian/Armbian or Fedora; you just boot from the approriate image on an SD card. Some SBCs have eMMC storage and/or a M2 connector, so you can either keep running off the SD card or transfer the image to that storage.
The value proposition of using SBCs is in their embedded connectivity; in addition to standard USB/network/HDMI ports they tend to have built-in connectors for:
* MIPI input, for video cameras
* MIPI output for LCD panels
* i2c and SPI for weird peripherals (accelerometers, temp sensors, etc)
* i2s for sound
* GPIO and timers/PWM for custom peripherals like motors/servos, contacts, programmable LEDs etc.
I mostly use them for things specifically designed to not need software maintenance. I use them in test fixtures and other embedded systems. Anything that is connected to a network isn't connected to the internet, and regardless of a network connection, I always set the filesystem as immutable and create backups of the SD card, so if anything goes modified, restarting usually fixes it, but if not re-imaging the SD card for sure will.
I caught Orange Pi doing misleading advertising earlier, trying to make people hear that the CPU has an NPU. Does this actually have any AI hardware or not?
37 comments
[ 333 ms ] story [ 978 ms ] threadThat said, the actual processor cores in this SBC seem to max out at 256 bit registers, which does not seem to be a lot.
Whats the go there? Is there no distro like Raspbian supporting it?
Not bad at all, but the OpenWRT image still didn’t have Wi-Fi support a week or so ago, so I don’t know how good software support is going to be in the long run.
I need one of such devices for my self-hosted services. And it will be time to port from C to assembly, really, because we have finally a CPU ISA which is 'sweet spot' balanced, standard, global, pushed forward with significant resources and without IP locks anywhere. No more developer/vendor lock-in via "the only compiler able to generate correct machine code", extremely hard to do planned obsolescence, etc, we need mainstream adoption NOW :)
The main blocker: how do I buy such device with a noscript/basic (x)html browser? And no way I use a credit card on a web site: would require well identified bank swift account, or wallet codes bought from local and physical currency terminals. I don't know of any local retailers I can buy such device from. Yep, the "web geniuses" at amazon (which supports wallet code) broke noscript/basic (x)html support a few years ago.
I've bought RISC-V SBCs from both Pine64.com and Arace.tech, and neither required I make an account. Arace.tech does require JavaScript to checkout, but Pine64.com does appear to work without it, although I didn't complete a transaction without it. Pine64.com also accepts USDC payments, but no other cryptocurrency.
I own one since a couple months ago but I already regret the purchase.
Sucked too as I lost $300 but hopefully helps open source community anyway
My notes from that little project are here -
https://www.hydrogen18.com/blog/orange-pi-rv2-first-look-ker...
Regardless of the Linux distribution, it's still way to early to get good support for RISC-V. Current products are good enough for general development, but RVA23 was ratified less than a year ago, and I don't know of any designs started after the ratification that have hit the market yet. Once that's the case, it should be easier to get universal support, but until then, every RISC-V SBC is a one-off development board.
So far, all the RISC-V SBC's I've tried were woefully under-powered compared to a comparably-priced Raspi.
I used to occasionally buy a single board computer ~10 to ~5 years ago.
Then I waited until SBC's reached the 32GB RAM level. The first such affordable and performant board was an Orange Pi 5+ or 5B (I should double check, may add a comment later).
I believe I wanted the Orange Pi 5+ but it was sold out, so I ordered and paid for the Orange Pi 5B (the 2 ethernet port variant) which was a bit more expensive but was still for sale. Both had 32GB RAM, my main requirement. There were multiple "flavors", with power adapters or with case or with memory card or eMMC etc. I chose the memory/eMMC version.
I sent a message to ask them to give me heads-up when they are about to ship mine, and then I was patient.
Then I waited, and waited, and waited.
Too patient, after a long while I start looking up on forums if other people are also waiting. I discover I am not the only one. So I take up contact again and ask when the board will be shipped.
They inform me the SBC is no longer manufactured, and offer me inflation-devalued currency.
I check which single board computers they still sell, and indeed they no longer sell the 5B variant, but now the 5+ is back in stock.
I ask them if they can just ship me the 5+ instead of the 5B. They refuse.
OK, I ask them how much I can pay extra so they ship me the 5+ instead of their unilaterally discontinued 5B.
They refuse.
A few months pass by. I ask again if they intend to ship the 5B as agreed, or the 5+ as a substitute.
So here comes the orange Lie:
They claim they shipped it, and provide a DHL link.
I first name (same as my father's) is German, even though I live in Belgium.
Their DHL link, is a shipment to somewhere in Germany, with a weight far below the weight of a single board computer, and which was delivered just minutes before their sending this message claiming shipped delivery.
I confront them that the weight of the SBC is advertised on their own site, and their DHL delivery link lists a value far below it, that I live in Belgium and the shipping address was in Belgium (I have 0 links to Germany), and that the timing of the delivery and their response message is so close it suggests people at customer support (presumably without arbitrary access to deliveries outside of the case) asked colleagues to let them know if a case pops up with a German delivery, so they can manually copy and paste bluff delivery of product X to customer Y as if it was my order to me into the message.
I confront them and ask them to answer a numbered list of questions.
They refuse to answer the questions (they can't without incriminating themselves), instead they offer me my money back.
Don't buy into the orange lie.
If you work for Orange Pie, feel free to msg me with a way to contact you, if you positively resolve my case I will remove this message.
I'm sorry you have this experience but it's definitely not typical.
The work required to build an actual secure, maintainable product on top of an SBC is so big that you'd surely never use one of these. The hard work is all in software. You need a supplier with product lifetime guarantees and a known SoC manufacturer.
If you're a hobbyist, unless you really don't value your time you'd be much better served buying an x86 PC or a Raspberry Pi for whatever project you've got. Any money saved buying one of these would be completely negated by the extra time taken to maintain it.
So who's the target market? Are there products out there built on these? Or are they mostly just shipped straight into desk drawers? How many of these do they actually ship?
They make decent home servers, unless you need fast storage.
The value proposition of using SBCs is in their embedded connectivity; in addition to standard USB/network/HDMI ports they tend to have built-in connectors for:
* MIPI input, for video cameras
* MIPI output for LCD panels
* i2c and SPI for weird peripherals (accelerometers, temp sensors, etc)
* i2s for sound
* GPIO and timers/PWM for custom peripherals like motors/servos, contacts, programmable LEDs etc.
I'm not sure if any RISC-V boards support ACPI, and Unified Discovery is not even specified yet, so ... yeah probably don't buy this. We'll get there.
https://github.com/riscv/configuration-structure