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Comment by ColanR | Hacker News Reader

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.

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It's still a decent start, and I'm hoping future versions will begin open sourcing the rest of the chip core like the memory controller. It'd be nice to have a good DDR IP core for things like this.

EDIT: Removed a bit of the comment from a misunderstanding from reading the article

Isn't Alibaba also in the process of open-sourcing the XT910 design?

It would seem so: https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/27/alibaba_risc_v_chip/

Original iPhone managed 60fps with an even slower processor (412MHz - https://everymac.com/systems/apple/iphone/specs/apple-iphone...). I know it only had 320x480 resolution, but if you consider that the CPU's job is to keep the GPU busy then I see no reason that efficient software could get a smooth UI out of this processor paired to a 60fps-capable GPU. Having said that, 'efficient software' is like hens teeth nowadays :)

> I see no reason that efficient software could get a smooth UI out of this processor paired to a 60fps-capable GPU

Depends on your expectations, technically NES had 60 FPS GPU.

If you want to drive a FullHD at that rate, and render GUI comparable to modern phones - you need 3D acceleration, ideally programmable shaders, and the fillrate.

GPU is unavailable at launch, they say it will appear in later versions, and it will be a PoverVR. Never said which PowerVR.

The Pi Zero is single core at 1GHz so it's not a totally fair comparison. There are plenty of times I wish I had more cores, even if they were half the speed. Compiling anything on the zero is incredibly slow. It also has slower DDR2 RAM and no USB3 (which makes a big difference for many peripherals).

But zero is well.... a zero.... If you don't want to mess with arduino/esp*, but want a price point and size in that range, with full linux support, to connect a thingy to another thingy (eg sensor to web/mqtt), and don't care about additional power use, you take a rpi0. I don't think it was ever meant as a "normal computer" or a "server" (as we use normal-sized RPis for).

Sure! The Zero is great as a cheap DAQ, I use them all the time. But the SBC that it's being compared to is much more full featured and I don't think you can say it's worse or even comparable.

The Arduino Uno retails for around $30 and gives you a 16MHz CPU and 2KB of RAM so I don’t think specs and price are that related, especially when looking at different architectures.

Microcontroller vs microprocessor. Also I don't know anyone who pays RRP on Arduinos. If I need one for a project I get a Pro Mini (same specs, much smaller) for $2 shipped from China.

You don’t use Chinese clone in a commercial product. Especially when whole system costs $15k+

You don't use arduinos in commercial products either. You design your own board and drop a atmega328p on it so you don't have to deal with the support calls of the arduino working it's way loose.

Way too expensive for 5 pieces yearly. Especially for toggling couple pins and LEDs.

It's roughly in the same class when compared to Arduino/uC RISC-V boards that really are incomparable and suited to a completely different type of application.

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.

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....

The achievable clock speed is mostly a function of the pipeline depth and how well the design is optimized, the ISA should have very little impact on it. There are a bunch of high-clocked high-performance ARM chips available because several huge companies have already made large R&D investments into developing them.

The SiFive HiFive Unleashed has quad RV64GC plus one RV64IMAC and runs at around 1.5 GHz in TSMC 28nm -- mine's a little unstable at 1.5 after three or four hours at full load, but it's perfect at 1.4.

It was pricey at $999 because the chips are from low volume "shuttle run" aka MPW production (probably $300 or $400 each -- would be maybe $10 in volume production) and the board has 8 GB DDR4 2400 and other expensive things such as FMC connector.

But it's well faster than a Pi 3 and I've had 2.5 years of use out of it already...

Only looks like 16-bit RAM too.

A board competitive with the Raspberry Pi 1B (800 MHz single core) is not "incomparable."

The 1B came out in 2012, and you can now get a Pi with 4× Cortex-A72 1.5 GHz and 2 GB of RAM for the same price as the 1B cost then. The title does say "alternative".

rpi1b is still on sale, sure.

It would be up to picorio being more open than the pi (easy to do, but not if they fuck up by including a powervr gpu) and/or using less power.

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