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Raspberry Pi Foundation Announces RISC-V Foundation Membership

posted by takyon on Saturday January 12 2019, @05:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the chip-off-the-old...chip? dept.

martyb writes:

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.

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  • (Score: 1) by NateMich on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:28PM (1 child)

    by NateMich (6662) on Saturday January 12 2019, @10:28PM (#785694)

    It's possible that a 4th or 5th edition of RasPi would be more powerful than my current computers.

    But if the io and ram are crippled again, that's very unlikely.

    The problem I've always had with these things (and I no longer own one) is that once you have all the parts needed to make this into a cheap and functional little machine, you've saved almost nothing from just using a very low end PC (like a mini itx with soldered on processor). The PC will be nearly infinitely more powerful and flexible.

  • (Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday January 12 2019, @11:14PM

    by epitaxial (3165) on Saturday January 12 2019, @11:14PM (#785708)

    Do you know the intent of the Pi? It was to make the cheapest system so students could afford it for learning. If you need something more powerful then buy it. This is engineering 101.