Pine64, which is a maker of many boards that are alternatives to Raspberry Pi, including the Rock64 and Quartz64, has announced a RISC-V alternative to Raspberry Pi. The company is saying it will be a “powerful, yet affordable” board based on an open-source architecture.
This new board, still in its nascent stages, goes unnamed at that moment for an SoC, but is probably going to run the Imagination technologies BXE-2-32 GPU. The GPU is licensed to RISC-V manufacturers on a list that included RIOS Lab, SiFive, and Yadro.
This seems to be leading or at least leaning towards the performance of an Arm-based Quartz64 and may have the same form factor as the Quartz 64 Model A. From all quadrants, the board will sport USB 3.0 and PCIe, a choice of 4GB or 8GB RAM, with a price tag of about the same as the Quartz64. The 4GB version of the Quartz64 sells for $60 in the Pine64 store.
Pine64 is running a competition to name the board, with the prize being the first production model off the line. There is a riddle to be posted on the Pine64 website to be solved and the guesses to the riddle in the comments section below the riddle.
Lukasz Erecinski, Pine64 Community Manager, pointed out in a recent written interview, that the foray into the RISC-V realm won’t affect the ARM range of boards being offered. He said “The RISV-V platform is something we wish to pursue in parallel to our well established Arm-based hardware. We have some candidate devices for a RISC-V conversion and ideas for future iterations of hardware3 based on the architecture. This is something I believe many of you will find exciting. In short: we have made a decision to commit to the RISC-V platform.”
For additional information see the Pine64 product update page. There is some news about the update, that is very recent.
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