Another StarFive JH7110 board, eh? It's shaping up to be a popular chip. I wonder how hard it would be for a different chip vendor to produce a pin-compatible clone? Please, overwhelm me with cheap interchangeable RISC-V SoC's... my body is ready.
It's a nice chip, but would have been SO MUCH better if it has been available to board-makers in September 2021, as originally planned for the BeagleV "Starlight", not in January 2023.
In 2021 it was clearly a much faster alternative to the Allwinner D1 with a single 1.0 GHz core, which had started arriving in customer hands in late June. The D1's C906 core had a vector unit, but that was the only real advantage.
Now in the first half of 2023 the Pi 3-class JH7110 is running up against the Pi 4-class TH1520.
The VisionFive 2 and Star64 started arriving in the hands of customers in February and April, while the considerably faster (higher MHz and OoO, plus vector units) TH1520-based LicheePi4A started arriving in May. There will no doubt be other TH1520 boards soon too.
So far the 8 GB JH7110 boards are roughly $40 cheaper than an equivalently outfitted 8 GB TH1520 board. Perhaps the effective difference is more than that as as VisionFive 2 and Star64 have M.2 or PCIe while the LP4A doesn't.
So maybe there is a place for both. Let's see what price the Mars will be.
Sipeed now has at two RISC-V "compute modules" that follow the concept but don't attempt to be Pi compatible:
- LicheeRV module, Allwinner D1, same as the R-01, but with two side by side M.2 connectors as the interface. They sell a LicheeRV Dock for it.
- Lichee Module 4A, THead TH1520 SoC. Currently only available as part of Lichee Pi 4A, but they plan to sell the module separately, as well has a motherboard holding a cluster of 7 modules, a tablet, a laptop, maybe a phone. Uses a SODIMM connector.
In addition, Sipeed have a number of other lower powered RISC-V "module" products using K210, BL808, BL702. Most with circuit boards with castellated edges as the connector, some with some kind of edge connector. And some ARM ones too.
Proprietary drivers are available and work.
Open source drivers in the form of a mesa3d driver are being developed by a third party employed by Imagination Technology. We know about this effort since early last year.
I do not know the state of the effort.