
PicoRio Linux RISC-V SBC is an open-source alternative to Raspberry Pi board - hippospark
https://www.cnx-software.com/2020/09/04/picorio-linux-risc-v-sbc-is-an-open-source-alternative-to-raspberry-pi-board/
======
byset
Interesting that the group behind this is Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen
Institute, which is sponsored by UC Berkeley as well as a major Chinese
university and the Shenzhen government.

China is quite interested in RISC-V gaining traction as trade and security
barriers rise and they work to build up their domestic technology sector.

Going into wild-ass speculation mode, if this board really is affordable, I
wonder if it's being subsidized by the Chinese gov't to encourage RISC-V
adoption.

If I understand correctly, it's hard to make a cheap RISC-V Linux board with a
price in the same order of magnitude as Raspberry Pi, because the Pi benefits
from the availability of cheap, powerful ARM-based CPUs that were mass-
produced for the mobile phone market. Linux-capable RISC-V parts have nowhere
near these economies of scale.

~~~
monocasa
Do we know the foundry?

I like your idea because I could see the Chinese government doing this to help
prop up SMIC too. The RPi4 isn't any smaller than 16nm, and SMIC needs 14nm
customers.

Shoot for the 500MHz target listed, which is achievable with Victorian era
style over engineering. Next sell those more or less at cost after the
government footed the bill for initial capital (probably paying back .gov.cn
first). Then using the massive body of software you expect from the new
ecosystem around the first wave of chips to reoptimize the cores and inch your
way towards really competitive chips. All the while SMIC gets great experience
at their lower node with a pretty low risk, but high volume project.

Total speculation, but fun speculation. If someone pulls that off they
probably win the whole Made in China 2025 thing for homegrown computers in an
interesting enough niche to have a foreign audience too.

~~~
bydo
Image in the article says TSMC 28nm.

[https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/09/Pico...](https://www.cnx-software.com/wp-
content/uploads/2020/09/PicoRio-RISC-V-SBC-Raspberry-Pi-Alternative.jpg)

~~~
throwaway4good
Apparantly we are in for another major escalation of the chip wars:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-smic-
exclusive/...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-smic-
exclusive/exclusive-trump-administration-weighs-blacklisting-chinas-chipmaker-
smic-idUSKBN25V2VR)

Exclusive: Trump administration weighs blacklisting China's chipmaker SMIC

~~~
dis-sys
The message here is clear - US is not a reliable tech vendor.

This is the exact reason why RISC-V is getting increasingly more attentions.

------
ColanR
Promising hardware, though this isn't looking like comparable hardware even to
the Raspberry Pi Zero. Only has a quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) processor
at 500+ MHz. RAM size not specified. If it was priced in the $5-15 range it
would be more or less practical, but higher than that I'd be buying it solely
for the architecture novelty.

~~~
drmpeg
I'm a little concerned that these RV64GC implementations all end up at about
500-600 MHz. There's plenty of 1.5 GHz ARM processors at 28 nm.

~~~
kinghajj
SonicBOOM, the latest of the Berkley Out-of-Order Machine from UC Berkley, was
fabbed for running at 1 GHz.[0]

[0]:
[https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_15_Zhao....](https://carrv.github.io/2020/papers/CARRV2020_paper_15_Zhao.pdf)

------
monocasa
Oof, GPU by Imagination Technologies.

Here's hoping their close brush with death opened them to the idea of open
sourcing their code.

~~~
phkahler
>> Oof, GPU by Imagination Technologies.

My first thought as well. On the other hand... baby steps. We need a chip like
this very much. If the first ones are slow or too proprietary that may be OK,
it is still pushing the RISC-V ecosystem in the right direction. It will help
validate a lot of software which will enable more open designs by having
things ready to go.

~~~
ansible
I've recently purchased a Sipeed Maix Bit, which is based on the Kendryte K210
(RV64GC dual-core), just so that I can start messing around in the RISC-V
64-bit ecosystem. However, the K210 has just 8MB of on-chip RAM, limiting the
applications. It ships with MicroPython, and you can run microcontroller
Linux, which is a fun little hack.

However, I'm primarily interested in Rust development on the RISC-V. For bare-
metal programming, the K210 is enough for me to get my feet wet. Thanks to the
wonderful community, you can already run gdb for source-level debugging of
Rust on that platform, with the addition of a $7 USD JTAG adapter.

That said, as long as the PicoRio board (even without a GPU) is available for
less than $100 USD, I am totally buying one as soon as they are available for
order.

------
OJFord
I honestly didn't realise the Raspberry Pi isn't open source. Why isn't it?

The Foundation's charitable objective is education, so sure, it's not
_necessary_ , but there really seems to be no reason for it to be closed - I
suppose it's just 'closed by default'?

~~~
inetsee
I believe it's because the Broadcom System-on-a-Chip (SOC) that the Raspberry
Pi uses has one or more binary BLOBS that are required to access features on
the SOC. RISC-V is an open standard; chips made based on this standard are
open source.

~~~
kayfox
It is possible for open source replacements for those blobs to be written, but
I have not heard of any serious effort in that respect.

~~~
floatboth
[https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-
firmware](https://github.com/librerpi/rpi-open-firmware) is a pretty serious
attempt at the bootloader (incl. VC4 side). As in they can boot an OS, with
some limitations but still.

------
snvzz
Apparently they plan to include a PowerVR GPU on the second generation boards.

That's not very OSHW if you ask me. I'd rather an unaccelerated framebuffer,
or even no graphics at all.

They don't seem to understand what kind of market there is for this sort of
device. If I didn't care about this sort of thing, I would just grab one of
the many proprietary-encumbered SBCs, any of which faster and cheaper than
this board is going to be.

~~~
monocasa
FWIW, every chip I've seen with a PowerVR GPU uses a video scan out engine
that's pretty much completely disconnected from the GPU.

That's one of the neat things about how programmable their cores are; you can
resolve in the tile to just about any surface format since it's all done in
software anyway, so it's really easy to integrate with other scan IP blocks.

TL;DR: You'll probably get a simple un-accelerated framebuffer (maybe with a
few planes) with a PowerVR off to the side that you can just ignore if you
want.

~~~
snvzz
>with a PowerVR off to the side that you can just ignore if you want.

The problem is that I can't, and most people who care about freedom and thus
could be interested in a slower, more expensive board... can't either.

~~~
monocasa
Of course you can, just ignore it, and pretend it isn't there. Don't even load
its drivers. Because of dark silicon, you won't be able to fully light up the
chip anyway. Use the GPU being off to clock other parts faster if you want.
You still get an unaccelerated framebuffer if it has the same arch as every
other chip I've seen with a PowerVR for the past twenty years (Dreamcast,
BeagleBoard, iPhones, PSP Vita, the MIPS board they came out with that I'm
forgetting the name of).

~~~
snvzz
>Because of dark silicon, you won't be able to fully light up the chip anyway.

If it's a separate chip, that's better, because I can cut power to it, or
outright desolder it.

Still, I'd be uncomfortable having paid for a chip I did not want. Much like
being forced to pay for Windows when buying a laptop to run netbsd on.

My point, if you missed it, is that this is not the sort of purchasing
experience those who'll pay extra coin for a board with a slower chip that's
also less power efficient just because it's more open would actually desire.
And thus, it is not sensible to include such a chip.

------
MaxBarraclough
Unfortunately not purely based on Free and Open Source software:

> Exceptons (sic): foundry related IPs and high-speed commercial interface,
> but gradually reduce close source (sic) usage over time

Wonder what the FSF will make of it. They've long lamented that Raspberry Pi
depends on non-Free software.

[https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-
computers](https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers)

~~~
monocasa
That's talking about the HDL, not the software.

------
nl
See also [https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-Maix-
Cube-p-4553.html](https://www.seeedstudio.com/Sipeed-Maix-Cube-p-4553.html)

This is RISC-V, with a neural co-processor (runs YOLO), camera, GPIOs, leds
etc. For $25.

It runs MicroPython out of the box, but someone has Linux booting on the board
equivalent.

I have one, and there are teething pains but the platform seems pretty
capable.

~~~
brucehoult
You can technically get a cut-down Linux kernel and a couple of small programs
on it, but with only 8 MB RAM it's awfully limited. You need 256 MB or 512 MB
absolute minimum for any kind of reasonable modern desktop distro, and better
2+ GB.

~~~
nl
Why would you want to run a desktop distro on a device like this? That's not
what you get this for.

------
jmnicolas
> Storage – TBD, likely MicroSD card

Meh. I wish they would realize that SD cards are not made to be a system disk.
I need SATA or NVME ports and lots of them so I can build my own NAS!

~~~
somedude11
So much this. Don't make this another unreliable toy wasting space in
somebodys drawer.

------
ecesena
What's the latest on a cheap, small board where you can run linux, with BLE &
WiFi 2.4/5GHz?

Rpi Zero W and the corresponding Banana Pi M2 Zero meet all criteria except
the 5GHz. Beside these, I have a really hard time finding any cheap
alternative.

There's plenty of embedded devices for iot, from arduino to all others. But
100% of the iot I have in my apartment are actually powered and don't need a
batter/extremely low consumption. I much rather enjoy the flexibility of
running linux (or android) vs flashing a firmware.

~~~
tjoff
Why do you want 5GHz? Seems 2.4GHz would be a better fit for the usecase.

~~~
ecesena
You can share your wifi config from the phone to the device, but my phone is
connected to 5GHz and not 2.4, so that doesn't work. I then have to connect my
phone to the 2.4 and then forget the network. It's just an unnecessary step.

------
ArchD
"even though the goal is to eventually have as much IP released under a BSD-
like open source license"

What do people mean _exactly_ by 'IP' in contexts like this related to
computing boards such as SBCs and FPGAs?

The only 'IP' I know is a term pertaining to legal concepts like patents,
where 'IP' and 'patent' are almost synonymous. In the current context, what
does it mean to 'release' this 'IP'? How do you 'release' a patent?

~~~
bruckie
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_intellectual_p...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_intellectual_property_core)

It's a logic or semiconductor layout design for a component (e.g. a processor
core, or a peripheral like a UART, DMA controller, etc.). "IP" for hardware is
roughly analogous to "source code" for software.

~~~
monocasa
It sort of colloquially gets used as "subsystem" or "library" as well. Tends
to refer to a piece that can be treated more or less as a black box and
imported with well defined semantics.

------
makapuf
One of the comments I made to myself was that on the die shots, USB3 part is
as big as a CPU core ! What would need so much silicon ? Isn't USB3 hardware
more or less a serial bus? Is it logic or memory or analog interface parts
here? I am curious.

~~~
simcop2387
There's a great deal of communication that happens outside the operating
system, and a bunch of different multiplexing modes and things like that.
There's at least 4 different speeds it's going to need to talk at (1.5mbps,
12mbps, 480mbps, and 5gbps) with a good deal of synchronization and other
bits. There's a rather decent amount of logic that has to be implemented, and
I wouldn't be shocked if you end up needing what basically amounts to another
CPU for the controller itself to manage the entire connection and negotiation.
Depending on the physical construction it might also need some decent power
transistors if it's also handling the 2 amp current limit on usb3.0 internally
(rather than signalling ones outside the chip).

~~~
drmpeg
The popular Cypress/Infineon FX3 USB3 controller has a 200 MHz ARM926EJ core
on chip.

[https://www.cypress.com/file/140296/download](https://www.cypress.com/file/140296/download)

~~~
monocasa
Nvidia at one point used one of their home grown Falcon cores (which looks
like it could be around the same gate approximate gate count) to baby sit the
USB3 phy as well. They're probably going to switch to RISC-V for that if they
haven't already.

------
nsajko
Why is RISC-V even so hyped up/successful? Other open ISAs precede it, and
AFAIK the code density that RISC-V allows is disappointing considering the
designers had an opportunity to start from scratch.

~~~
vlmutolo
One concrete advantage RISCV has is its variable-length SIMD instruction set.
The assembly instructions used for SIMD in RISCV can all operate on data sizes
that are various powers of 2. All using the same instructions. You could even
call it “SIMD with dynamically-sized data”.

Right now, x86 needs one set of instructions for each SIMD data size. That’s
why we have SSE, AVX, AVX512, etc. This introduces complexity for both
hardware designers and software designers. You have to actively update
software to work with newer chips with larger SIMD registers. In the proposed
RISCV design, you wouldn’t have to. It would just work on all sizes.

~~~
floatboth
Arm SVE is also variable data size, and it's already in production on
Fujitsu's massive HPC clusters :P

~~~
brucehoult
SVE looks pretty good. But ARM themselves are showing absolutely no signs of
incorporating it into any of their own cores, despite the specs being
published as part of ARMv8.2-A in January 2016. They're up to ARMv8.6-A now,
with 8.7 or maybe ARMv9 expected any time.

------
lsllc
If this is real ... sign me up! I have a couple of RISC-V Arduino clones,
interesting but not that useful. I've ported software to RISC-V using the
Fedora RISC-V port running under QEMU. It'll be nice to finally get
inexpensive Linux capable hardware in hand!

Of course, what would be _really_ good would be a CHIP-Pro style module that
is a complete Linux SBC suitable for inclusion in a IoT PCB design. Thus far,
the CHIP-Pro (ARM-32) and Onion Omega2 (MIPS-32) have been the only viable
reasonably priced embeddable Linux modules I've seen.

~~~
rkagerer
Didn't Next Thing Co, the makers of CHIP, go bankrupt? (I recall a Voder
backer order I had with them that never materialized)

~~~
lsllc
They did but the founder started up again with the same design. Only the price
is much higher (can't blame them, the CHIP-Pro was a steal which I think is
why they went under).

EDIT: The reboot was called Source Parts but it looks like they may have gone
under also. Too bad, the CHIP-Pro was pretty nice.

------
qchris
It looks like it has some details on "slow" i/o like UART and I2C, but not
sure if that counts things like analog PWM timers for certain pins, like there
are on RPis. Does anyone have any more information on that? You can do it all
in software on a UART, but I think that can be a little more tricky. Since so
many basic embedded projects can be helped with that kind of functionality, it
would be awesome if it was available.

------
rcarmo
I like the idea of going multi-core from the start. The Pi Zero W is massively
under-powered when compared to its siblings, but IMHO suffers a lot more from
being single-core than from any other constraint.

(Which is why I use the 3A+ for most of my stuff, really. Four cores and full-
size HDMI and USB are very useful indeed.)

------
arexxbifs
One of the key selling points for me is the RasPi OS and software ecosystem.
Raspbian a great distro, very well aligned with the hardware. Getting a
generic distro to boot on a system isn't the same as ensuring a smooth
experience with things like system config, video playback, networking and
peripherals.

~~~
kelnos
In some ways I see this as a downside. Despite how many years the RPi has been
a thing, the drivers for it _still_ aren't fully upstreamed to the Linux
kernel, and the device tree in mainline is very different from that in the RPi
Foundation's kernel fork.

The RPi-specific userspace bits are just (in the past year or so) starting to
become more standard (like moving the stuff in /opt/vc to standard system
locations, having a normal kernel headers package).

I don't _want_ a specially-built OS just for one piece of hardware. I want to
run stock Debian, with a stock kernel. And yes, I _can_ do that, but as you
hit at, the experience is sometimes lacking (for a while I couldn't get sound
to work with stock Debian).

I've been looking at some of the RPi workalike boards that run Armbian... I
haven't dug into it yet to evaluate the quality of Armbian, but I at least
like the overall approach of having one OS that can support different chipsets
and boards.

------
kimsant
The chip industry will do like the telecom industry.

1st few players grow it important 2nd it becames a big monopoly, we all depend
on 3rd other players need 10 years to build competition ( needed time to build
cable/towers) ( needed time to develop processors ) 4th you have a bunch of
players, all with FIX COSTS and with a 1$ variable cost for new customers, the
competition squeez the margins to arround Zero. 5th you still have to keep up
with the improvements ( 5G?? / 7nm??, 6nm?? ), so just to keep going
investments are needed, and so profits disappear in the industry

airlines, Telecom, .... next chipmakers

------
minetest2048
I understand why the memory and USB controller is closed source, but why do
the slow IOs such as I2C and SPI is also closed source?

------
bfuclusion
Sweet. I'll monitor this an order a non-gpu version when it comes out. Most of
my stuff just needs a serial console.

~~~
ansible
Hilariously, on one of the slides posted to Twitter, the phase 1 chip won't
have low-speed peripherals. But I'm sure they'll include at least one serial
port. No one is going to get very far without even a serial console.

The phase 1 SoC is all I'm interested in for now. The lowest-size LPDDR4 part
I could find is 256MB, which isn't a lot, but enough for what I want to do.
Having that RAM, and networking _or_ USB, will be enough for me to buy one.
Assuming a reasonable price, of course.

~~~
vhodges
'Only' 128MB but [https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/good-stuff-
department/pr...](https://groupgets.com/manufacturers/good-stuff-
department/products/orangecrab) is capable of running a linux capable core and
it's tiny (Adafruit's Feather form factor)

~~~
ansible
That's actually not a bad little board.

I've been laser focused on RV64, but RV32 is nearly identical. It is a shame
the current VexRiscv bitstream for this board doesn't seem to support atomics
though.

------
ComputerGuru
Really, it’s the price and mass market availability more than anything else
that makes the Raspberry Pi a Raspberry Pi, moreso than the exact featureset
(especially considering the difference in capabilities between the original
and v4). No word on that, it seems?

------
Havoc
>The board will target the Raspberry Pi price

That would be amazing. RISC V has thus far not struck me as something within
reach of the average casual consumer.

------
voltagex_
"The first board without GPU is planned for Q4 2020, following with one with
PowerVR GPU in 2021.".

Ah, how quickly we forgot the GMA500/Poulsobo chip.

~~~
frabbit
I didn't. It was the first thing that leapt to my mind as soon as I saw
Imagination Technologies mentioned:

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2009/12/pouls...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2009/12/poulsbo-mess-casts-a-shadow-on-intels-moblin-
project/?comments=1&post=119130)

What sort of person describes a board with a closed-source GPU firmware as
"Open Source"?

------
jhallenworld
Will the chips be available on their own? This is the biggest problem with
Raspberry-PI- I can't buy the CPU on Digikey.

