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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: 2) by theluggage on Sunday January 13 2019, @12:09AM
No, it didn't make PCs seem cheaper, it made them cheaper - especially when they came with UHF modulators so you could plug them into the TV set that you already had... (proper monitors cost an arm and a leg in 1980 when there was no mass market for them...)
My first Pi spent most of its life providing DNS, DHCP and an endpoint for incoming SSH tunnels on my home network, for which it didn't need a keyboard, mouse or monitor after it had been set up. The second one spent a couple of years as a set-top box (acting as a front-end for TVHeadEnd on my too-noisy-for-the-living-room server) and is now acting as an audio player hooked up to my HiFi and is likewise headless. The third one, I actually bought the "official" touch screen for and I'm experimenting with using it as a sequencer/function generator for a Eurorack synth - and if that doesn't work out it could replace the audio player.
I could have tried to do these things with a jailbroken/rooted set top box or Android tablet - but they wouldn't have been any cheaper and wouldn't have anything like the level of online support. Also, a Pi can be swapped between tasks and back in a jiffy just by swapping out the SD card, without some touch-and-go re-flashing ritual.
The cheapness of the bare board is really important - if you find a permanent use for one, its an impulse buy to replace it, and if you try to hook one up to some electronics and let the magic smoke out there's not too much to cry over.
Yes there are drawbacks - all of the network/USB I/O is bottlenecked through a single and slightly quirky USB 2 port and relies on some proprietary binary blobs - but those are compromises resulting from using a mass-market system-on-a-chip designed to be embedded in consumer electronics and hence cheaply manufactured in vast quantities. Moving to full open-source, fixing the USB etc. is all well and good, but not if it ends up doubling the price.
There are lots of Pi alternatives that do one thing or another better - but the Pi is a good jack of all trades that combines reasonable general-purpose I/O, reasonable graphics and video performance, quite a decent CPU and completely unmatched community and commercial support.