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takyon writes:

Imagination has announced new B-series GPU designs focused on automotive and high-performance computing use cases, as it has become difficult for the company to compete in the mobile GPU market:

It's almost been a year since Imagination had announced its brand-new A-series GPU IP, a release which at the time the company called its most important in 15 years. The new architecture indeed marked some significant updates to the company's GPU IP, promising major uplifts in performance and promises of great competitiveness. Since then, other than a slew of internal scandals, we've heard very little from the company – until today's announcement of the new next-generation of IP: the B-Series.

The new Imagination B-Series is an evolution of last year's A-Series GPU IP release, further iterating through microarchitectural improvements, but most importantly, scaling the architecture up to higher performance levels through a brand-new multi-GPU system, as well as the introduction of a new functional safety class of IP in the form of the BXS series.

[....] Imagination's current highest-end hardware implementation in the BXT series is the BXT 32-1024, and putting four of these together creates an MC4 GPU. In a high-performance implementation reaching up to 1.5GHz clock speeds, this configuration would offer up to 6TFLOPs of FP32 computing power. Whilst this isn't quite enough to catch up to Nvidia and AMD, it's a major leap for a third-party GPU IP provider that's been mostly active in the mobile space for the last 15 years.

[....] Beyond the addition of safety critical features on the BXS series, the automotive IP also features some specific enhancements in the microarchitecture that allows for better performance scaling for workloads that are more unique to the automotive space. One such aspect is geometry, where automotive vendors have the tendency to use absurd amounts of triangles. Imagination says they've tweaked their designs to cover these more demanding use-cases, and together with some MSAA specific optimisations they can reach up to a 60% greater performance for these automotive edge-cases, compared to the regular non-automotive IP.

Related: Imagination Technologies Group Up for Sale

Original Submission

takyon writes:

VisionFive V1 RISC-V Linux SBC resurrects BeagleV single board computer

Last summer we reported that BeagleV StarFive RISC-V SBC would not be manufactured, but all was not lost as StarFive would collaborate with Radxa to make a new single board computer based on their JH7100 dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processor.

But thanks to a report on Heise and extra photos acquired by CNX Software, we now have more details about the board that mostly comes with the same features as the BeagleV StarFive, but a completely different layout that brings all the main ports to one side of the board.

[...] The specifications are mostly the same as for the BeagleV board, except the 4GB RAM is gone, and only 8GB RAM appears to be offered, and USB PD and Quick Charge are now supported, instead of just 5V/3A.

[...] There's no price nor availability information for the VisionFive V1 SBC, but we should learn more in a couple of weeks with the official announcement. The board will not be suitable for everyone since it lacks a GPU for 3D graphics accelerator, but we're also expecting the StarFive JH7110 in 2022 with four 64-bit RISC-V cores and an Imagination IMG BXE-4-32 GPU. [Update: The price will be $149 according to the presentation slides from RISC-V Summit, and the JH7110 board will be called VisionFive V2]

Also at Notebookcheck.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

Official Ubuntu RISC-V Images Released For StarFive's VisionFive Board

Canonical engineers spent the past few months back-porting various patches and ensuring that Ubuntu 22.04 LTS could run well on this RISC-V board. The StarFive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions. The board is powered by a dual-core SiFive U74 RV64 SoC @ 1.0GHz, there is 8GB of system memory, a NVDLA deep learning accelerator engine, Tensilica-VP6 Vision DSP, and a neural network engine. The board also has WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.2, HDMI output, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, and powered via USB-C or from the 40-pin GPIO header.

[...] Meanwhile StarFive is already teasing that the VisionFive V2 RISC-V SBC will be coming out soon as its successor.

Now you can run Ubuntu on a VisionFive single-board PC with a RISC-V processor

Aimed at developers, the first model launched last year with a dual-core processor, while a second-gen version with a quad-core chip and other upgrades is expected to be announced August 23, 2022.

Original Submission

takyon writes:

StarFive recently announced an SBC using the StarFive JH7110 quad-core 64-bit RISC-V SoC. Now Pine64 is announcing their own version, the Star64:

Pine64 Star64 is an upcoming single board computer (SBC) powered by StarFive JH7110 quad-core 64-bit RISC-V processor equipped with an Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU, and in a form factor similar to the earlier Pine64 model A boards such as the Quartz64 Model A.

The Star64 SBC will be offered with either 4GB or 8GB of RAM, an HDMI 2.0 video output connector, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 module, USB 3.0 ports, a PCIe slot, and a GPIO header for expansion.

[...] Both Star64 and VisionFive 2 SBCs offer many of the same features, but the Pine64 board provides access to the PCIe interface via a PCIe x4 slot instead of an M.2 socket and is equipped with a wireless module for WiFi and Bluetooth that the VisionFive 2 board completely does without.

More information about the JH7110 is available:

It's actually an SoC with six RISC-V cores, of which four 64-bit RISC-V cores run the main OS, plus a 64-bit RISC-V monitoring core, and a 32-bit RISC-V real-time core. The AI accelerators found in the JH7100 (Neural Network Engine and NVDLA) appear to be gone for good, and there are two 1-lane PCIe 2.0 interfaces up to 5 Gbps each.

Original Submission