Tag: jh7100

Allwinner D1s bumps D1; RIP BeagleV Starlight; Rough entry with Nezha D1.

Posted on by Robert Lipe

I’ve been away from writing for a bit for personal reasons and I’ve missed talking much about many events in the RISC-V world this year. Here’s a jumble of thoughts from October of 2021.

Low Points: BeagleV Starlight canceled, Nezha/D1 launch issues

I was lucky to have tinkered with the prerelease BeagleV board (codenamed Starlight) that featured the StarFive
JH-7100 SoC. It was well documented, had an amazing technical group of active participants from both corporate and hobbyist backgrounds, all working together on merit, and good tooling. Antmicro’s ‘Renode‘ emulator made developing on these parts a breeze.

Unfortunately for the business, BeagleV/Starlight and StarFive were unable to reach a production agreement and BeagleV Starlight project was cancelled. I did some software and hardware work that went into the proverbial chipper, but I managed to learn and refine some skills along the way. I remain hopeful that the low-volume (Two core) JH-7100 and later (Quad core, embedded GPU, PCIe) JH-7110 will be delivered at a similar price point by the likes of Antmicro or Radxa, which has already missed their ship date. It’s all resulted in some thrash, but it’s possible that all the players (Beagle, Antmicro, Radxa, Starfive) dust off and ship RISC-V boards.

I have possession of a Nezha developer board. This is the official development board made by Allwinner as a vehicle for their D1 chip. By contrast to StarFive, documentation on this device and board is poor.  The maker of the chip and the board, Allwinner,
having a pretty poor record playing nicely with open source developers with license violations being common. When it was at a price point similar to BeagleV, it seemed an underdog as a single core device, but it did have the claim to fame of being the first shipping device of supporting the RISC-V Vector extension. I’ve been a member of a few different discord/slack/telegram groups for this device and they’ve all been dominated by people stuck at the starting line: just finding a maintained distro that doesn’t require a login in Chinese and a phone number in China is a common challenge.

Unfortunately for many developers, D1 supported only 0.7.1 of Vector, which has source and binary incompatibilities with the final 1.0 version of that extension which is currently (October 2021) in final stages of public review. This part also really requires Allwinner’s own use of GCC/Binutils to use these extensions well. Interestingly, the RISC-V part of this SoC comes from Alibaba’s XuanTie C906 line, which was itself recently open-sourced, though there have been serious issues trying to land Alibaba’s incompatible work in upstream projects like GCC and QEMU.

I’d love to be able to comment more on the actual development board, but can’t as it appears my board is apparently totally DOA. I hope to be able to write more about it soon.

This board gets the (somewhat deserved) criticism of being overpriced when compared to high-volume devices like Pi and the (awkward) criticism of  having a single 1.0Ghz core and relying on an old version of the Vector specification. As the final version still doesn’t exist and fab times just plain take a while to get from Verilog  to real silicon, we can be only so mad at the first chip to support even a pre-release V spec. We can be more upset that the chip requires violating the RISC-V specification on reserved bits in the paging machinery. All this does lead to an up-looking highlight to finish up this catch-up.

On the Horizon: Allwinner D1s/F133

This week, there’s been interest in a new revision of the D1. The Allwinner D1s (sometimes called the “F133” for reasons I haven’t yet grasped) is a cost-optimized version of the original D1. Where the D1 really seemed to ship only with their own development board, Nezha, the D1s seems to come out of the gate ready for the likes of SeedStudio and Mango Pi’s ~$10USD RISC-V board  or in low quantity to put on your own open-source boards, like Xassette. 

It’s a slightly confusing product, but some of that may just be translation/documentation issues.  It’s cost-reduced, and that filters through to the boards we’ve seen so far. There’s 64MB of RAM on board, but it’s sold as “Linux ready”.  The removal of HDMI signaling means no monitor and 64MB will require a very stripped down system. Cramming Linux into the 8MB on a K210 was (barely) possible, so this must be possible, even if cramped.  Still, for a single-purpose or educational environment, that’s probably OK. The Allwinner F133 overview avoids any comparison to D1, refers to itself as “video decoding platform”, and even avoids use of the phrase “RISC-V” completely.

It’s interesting that one of the most controversial RISC-V chips of 2021 managed to ship a second revision this year while we have so many that have just seemingly collapsed under their own weight or never found their legs beyond original announcements. (Blink twice if you’re alive, PicoRio!) 

As we approach the end of the year, we’ve had quite some changes in the RISC-V ecosystem. It’s likely that the product families that have most met or exceeded my expectations are the BL602/706 family and Espressif’s menagerie of ESP32-C3 and ESP32-C6.

What have been your biggest disappointments or surprises in RISC-Ville? 

 

A Wealth of Upcoming RISC-V Options

Posted on by Robert Lipe

We’re all familiar with the fable of the boiling frogs, unable to sense the change they’re (literally!) immersed in. Enthusiasts of RISC-V architecture may be encountering the same right now: late 2020 gave us a steady stream of new hardware announcements, but we may not have a great sense of us since the hardware isn’t always possible to order yet. Let’s review some of the upcoming products in this market, duly nothing that products can change or get canceled before they even ship.

We had two major new families of entries in the iOT category. Both use the RISC-V to drive WiFi and Bluetooth radio stacks. Bouffalo Lab’s BL602 is available in quantity now. Starting around $2.50 for a module with multiple development boards in the $5-$10 range (including Pine64’s Nutcracker for PineCone and the DoIt DT-BL10), this chip starts with a core from SiFive and has 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 5. The upcoming BL-702 family adds Zigbee radios. There is enough compute resources (CPU, RAM, Timers, etc.) that you can build your own software right onto the radio chip via their multitasking OS and open development kits. You may recognize this as the basic model popularized by Espressif in their ESP8266 in recent years.

Espressif also embraced RISC-V with their upcoming ESP32-C3 family. It’s interesting that this chip doesn’t even get a distinct name at this point as Espressif apparently sees the CPU core as only a small part of the product. Still, by volume, the ESP32-C3 is likely to become an extremely popular choice.

Moving up a step computationally, we enter more traditional chips and single-board computers. Alibaba’s Xuantie 910 is widening into a family of chips. The C906 is being marketed for more entry level class, but still featuring a load of I/O, multiple cores, support for the still-not-ratified Vector extensions, and more. Press releases tend to mix up the 910 and the 906, but they both seem pretty hot.  In late January, anAndroid Open Source Port of C910 was demonstrated. Embedded specialists Sipeed have announced a C906 development board that’ll run Debian and that starts at $12.50. If Sipeed does for that what they’ve done for GD32V and K210, we should see lots of interesting SBC projects from them.

Sipeed teases C906 RISC-V board

Rios is bringing us a claimed competitor to the Raspberry Pi called the PicoRio. It’s coming inthree stages:

  • PicoRio 1.0 is a headless, four-core RV64GC that’s capable of running Linux at 500Mhz. It’s been used from 2020H2 to an expectation of beta in 2021H1.
  • PicoRio 2.0 adds Imagination’s PowerVR GE7800 XE series GPU, which may finally bring a GPU-capable RISC-V development board into casual hobbyist price points.
  • PicoRio 3.0 strives to bring the performance to be comparable to a tablet or desktop computer.

Another entry in the Pi-class of hardware, though not at Pi Price, is the Beagle V from the group that brought us the famed Beagle Bone. It uses two of SiFive’s U74 cores at 1Ghz includes 8GiB of LPDDR4 RAM, gigabit Ethernet, an 802.11n Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.2 chipset, and a dedicated hardware video transcoder supporting H.264 and H.265 at 4K and 60fps.The system also offers four USB 3.0 ports, a full-size HDMI out, 3.5mm conventional audio jack, and a 40-pin GPIO header. As a snack for those interested in AI applications, it also features  a Tensilica Vision VP6 DSP for machine-vision applications, a Neural Network Engine, and a single-core NVDLA (Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator).

Core provider SiFive is bolting Freedom U740 cores to a min-ITX design in HiFive Unmatched. X16 PCIe expansion, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, NVME M.2 slot, Gigabit ethernet, and four cores at 1.4Ghz should make this a entry-level desktop-class system, including host-CPU class of building for native applications at full scale. For professional developers, the $665 entry ticket should be more appealing that the $999 for the board’s predecessor, Unleashed.

The PicoRio V1 and Unmatched have already slipped from Q4 into 2021.

Still, while we’re not bathing in fresh alternatives to the GD32V and K210, we have several alternatives on the proverbial launching pad and several options to bring excitement into lives and toolboxes of RISC-V aficionados.

What do you see coming up? What are you most anxious to work with?