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Comment by farseer | Hacker News Reader

Have not seen any RISC-V offering from the Chinese yet. I wonder if SiFive will have any competition.

Here you go: M5Stack tiny computer with a camera, LCD and RISC-V AI-capable Chinese chip (Kendryte K210). Available on Digikey for $26.50: https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=K027&v=2221

Please note that it has a non-working MMU and is limited to 8 MB of DRAM. This is not the SBC you were looking for.

The MMU works fine, it's just poorly-documented and turns out to implement the incompatible draft-1.9.1 spec not the ratified and standard-going-forward 1.10 spec.

This is not Linux-capable though. The choices are FreeRTOS and bare metal. The chip is pretty unbelievable at that price though. You get a lot of functionality for $9. And it works - I have it on my desk.

Yes, it's the beauty of RISC-V: eventually, it's going to cover all the niches. From RFID energy-gathering chips up to desktop / datacenter CPUs.

Right now, its use is still very fragmentary, but Kendryte K210 chip shows that Chinese chip designers already got some real experience with RISC-V, and it's safe to bet it will be more chips with RISC-V coming from China every year.

For some value of "capable": https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/riscv/con...

Last time I looked at it (few months ago) the K210 had absolutely awful documentation (datasheet was basically just a pinout) in English and Chinese.

Not awful but for a high margin product I'd just use a US arm chip (e.g. LPCxx).

K210 has a decent AI accelerator (0.8 TFlops by their specs) that can run TFLite models at 300 mW). LCPxx are not even remotely capable of that.

True but I was looking at just for being RISC-V rather than the coprocessor

AllWinner are doing a big run (50 million rumoured) of RISC-V chips through TSMC.

Do you have a source for this? I'd love to know what node they're using. I'm guessing no better than 12nm, but who knows?

At some level... does it matter? The BCM2837 (used in the RPi 3), is 40nm if https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=137991 is to be believed; more advanced fabbing is good if you wanna go head-to-head with cutting edge ARM or even x86, but for a lot of stuff you don't need to be that good.

It will not be anything high performance.

http://www.semimedia.cc/?p=7803

T-Head's largest chip has 16 cores when built in 12nm. No idea what configuration AllWinner will be using, but the design itself is not a minnow.

Seems like they'll go for something low power and low performance at first. (from some chatter I've overheard on linux-sunxi)

Which company designed the riscv cores in the soc?

Ping-tou Ge aka T-Head Semiconductor, part of Alibaba.

Sounds like Alibaba might be working on something:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/08/21/alibaba-on-the-bleed...

Alibaba have presented their Xuantie910 RISC-V processor, one month ago at Hot Chips.

It is by far the RISC-V CPU with the highest performance ever designed.

Nevertheless, to reach that performance, they had to add a custom instruction set extension with indexed addressing modes, as a workaround for the greatest defect of the RISC-V ISA, its incomplete set of addressing modes.

Have you looked? Not seeing means you should probably turn on the light switch. You are in a dark room.

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