RISC-V Stumbling Blocks

Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by pjc50 on Thursday January 02, 2020 @08:04AM (#21935012)

For some reason, people have a fantasy that RISC-V is going to give them a sub-dollar microcontroller that runs Linux, rather than being like ARM where "microcontroller" and "Linux capable" and "server grade" are three entirely different market segments.

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Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by Quequau on Thursday January 02, 2020 @09:39AM (#21935639)

I've never met anyone who believed that RISC-V was going to give them a sub-dollar microcontroller that ran Linux before. That seems like a fairly unreasonable expectation, given today's market and RISC-V's position in it.

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Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by warrenm on Friday January 10, 2020 @03:41PM (#22015287)

I've met folks like that - ones who're getting ready to bet the farm on RISC-V taking-over not merely IoT, but mobile devices (phones, tablets, watches, wearables)

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Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by rjsw on Thursday January 02, 2020 @08:27AM (#21935142)

I have several ARM dev boards and am thinking of getting a PinePhone, am happy to pay upto $200 for something to play with but not $1000.

The HiFive Unleashed is interesting in that it has a lot more RAM than cheap ARM dev boards, for the same money though I could get a HoneyComb LX2K ARM system.

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Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by floatboth on Thursday January 02, 2020 @12:20PM (#21937369)

Not for the same money, for much cheaper.

HiFive Unleashed is $1000 for the board with onboard RAM… but it does not have PCIe onboard, so if you want that, you could pay $2000 extra (!!) for the "HiFive Unleashed Expansion Board" that has a giant FPGA that has a PCIe root complex programmed on it.

HoneyComb LX2K is $750 for the board with 64GB eMMC + bring your own SODIMMs for RAM.

SolidRun also offers the MACCHIATObin for $339. 4-core A72 + 4GB full-size DIMM included. (The single-channel-ness of the RAM is not good for performance, but you can install a big 16GB DIMM no problem.) Both the LX2K and the mcbin have PCIe of course :)

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Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by rwmj on Thursday January 02, 2020 @09:45AM (#21935700)

Are there sub-dollar ARM microcontrollers that run Linux? Anyway there are a bunch of cheap (not sub-dollar, but sub $30) RISC-V chips coming out of China this year which will run Linux.

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Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by pjc50 on Thursday January 02, 2020 @10:09AM (#21935918)

Not quite, but the "Linux business card" that went round recently uses the F1C100s, which is $3.50 including RAM in package. https://www.thirtythreeforty.net/posts/2019/12/my-business-c...

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Re:RISC-V Stumbling Blocks by alasarmas on Thursday January 02, 2020 @04:20PM (#21939966)

According to this link, the F1C100s has 32 Mbytes (!) of DRAM, which is pretty amazing for $1.42 USD in small quantities: https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/08/17/licheepi-nano-cheap-...

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