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$119+ BeagleV powerful, open-hardware RISC-V Linux SBC targets AI applications
Running Linux on RISC-V hardware is already possible, but you'd have a choice of low-end platforms like Kendryte K210 that's not really practical for anything, or higher-end board like SiFive HiFive Unmatched or PolarBerry for which you'd have to spend several hundred dollars, or even over one thousand dollars to have a complete system.
So an affordable, usable RISC-V Linux SBC is clearly needed. We previously wrote about an upcoming Allwinner RISC-V Linux SBC that will be mostly useful for camera applications without 3D GPU, and a maximum of 256MB RAM. But today, we have excellent news, as the BeagleBoard.org foundation, Seeed Studio, and Chinese fanless silicon vendor Starfive partnered to design and launch the BeagleV SBC (pronounced Beagle Five) powered by StarFive JH7100 dual-core SiFive U74 RISC-V processor with Vision DSP, NVDLA engine, and neural network engine for AI acceleration.
[...] Based on our previous article about SiFive U74 core, performance should be similar to Cortex-A55, so a dual-core U74 RISC processor will not have that much processing power compared to other Arm boards, but the network accelerator should make it competitive against other AI boards like Coral Dev Board mini.
One obvious item missing from the specifications is a GPU, and I was told while the first batch scheduled in March will be GPU less, but the next batch – slated to be manufactured in September – will come with an Imagination Technologies GPU.
BeagleV will be supported by mainline Linux and a Debian-based software image will be provided. I can also see mentions of Fedora and FreeRTOS. The RISC-V Linux SBC will be open-source hardware just like other boards from the BeagleBoard.org foundation meaning hardware design files, firmware, and the software will be made available publicly.
Related: SiFive Announces HiFive Unmatched Mini-ITX Motherboard for RISC-V PCs
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday January 14 2021, @08:10PM (1 child)
Emulation of legacy becomes more feasible with each passing day. The Linux on my wristwatch is a more powerful machine than my first Linux desktop PC in June 1999.
Look at how successfully MAME made obsolete ancient video games continue to have new life. It became possible to emulate these machines at real-time performance of their originals.
I also know this from personal experience. In my employment in the 80's I was developing (specialized) accounting software in Pascal. We were aware of the Y2K problem far away in some distant future. But by then we would have an entirely different system, long since rebuilt into something more closely resembling perfection and ultimate bliss with unicorns and rainbows everywhere.
Y2K arrived. A few years before we got on fixing it -- in that same codebase I was talking about. Even though we had already finally begun rewriting into a new GUI system. (the web wasn't on our radar yet as a user interface) The trick was that the UCSD p-System stored dates in 2 bytes. 7 bits for the year. Our insight was that technically, the year could go up to 127 in those 7 bits, meaning up to 2027. We revised our text-based green screen interface to record years from 00-27 as 100-127 in those seven bits of a date. Now all date arithmetic and sorting just worked, everywhere. Lucky us.
I'm sure many programmers have been astonished how long software systems end up living on. Heck, people are still using COBOL on Mainframes. The real value of Mainframes is that it runs gazillions of lines of COBOL code written from the 1960's on.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday January 15 2021, @02:10AM
I'm not entirely sure this translates as well. If we are talking classic arcade machines (which is more or less the target for MAME) they are usually very dedicated machine that only really runs one thing (ok you can swap ROM:s and such and make it run other games but besides that). It's mostly emulates one or several 8-bit, sometimes 16-bit, processors usually running in the single digit Mhz range. So it's now well within emulation range with current hardware, and has been for quite some time really. Errors are usually when they triggered or did something fancy with the hardware that is missed in the emulators. That said emulating some 30 year old hardware should be doable if we fancy running old DOS applications or some early Windows etc, no issue I think, unless it requires some very specific hardware perhaps. As things gets newer tho it might be more trouble then it's worth if you have to run newer and newer versions of Windows sucking down resources like the bloated hog that it is.