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Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership:
[The Raspberry Pi] Foundation has announced that it is joining the RISC-V Foundation, suggesting that a shift away from Arm could be on the cards. "We're excited to have joined the RISC-V Foundation as a silver member," the Raspberry Pi Foundation posted to its Twitter account. "[We're] hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and Debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture."
A shift from the proprietary Arm architecture to RISC-V would fit in nicely with the Foundation's goal of low-cost, highly-accessible computing for education and industry – but would put paid to its tradition of keeping backwards compatibility where possible, something it has already suggested might be the case when it moves away from the Broadcom BCM283x platform for the Raspberry Pi 4. Foundation co-founder Eben Upton, though, is clear: the Foundation is currently focusing on supporting the ISA in software, and not with a development board launch.
I'm curious how many Soylentils have a Raspberry Pi (or more than one) and which model(s). How has your experience been? What are the positives and shortcomings you've encountered? Do you think it would be a good move for them to move to RISC-V?
More background on RISC-V is available at Wikipedia.
(Score: 3, Informative) by richtopia on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:16PM
I agree that better designed SBCs exist. I personally like the ODROID products myself, with an ODROID-C2 next to me right now. I would also buy one of the ODROID's Intel powered H2 if it was on sale; I've migrated back to x86 after adopting Docker.
However, the Raspberry Pi has always been more than a fun piece of hardware. The Rapsberry Pi Foundation is a charity to promote computer science in schools, and the cheap computer Raspberry Pi was the result of that mission. Being a UK charity, I remember them struggling to find manufacturing in the UK and had to opt for overseas components because of lack of availability. They also have promoted open source and open design with their software and hardware at every opportunity. RISC-V should help remedy some of these comprimises.