Sipeed Teases a $40 Single-Board Pc with Thoroughly-Ratified RISC-V Vector Extensions

Sipeed has posted photos teasing a new single-board computer centered on a RISC-V processor boasting the ratified RISC-V Vector Extension 1. — a thing which need to give a considerable enhance to on-gadget device mastering and artificial intelligence workloads.

“What about [a] 1.6GHz RISC-V C908 chip with RVV1.,” Sipeed posted to its formal Twitter account this week, referring to Alibaba’s T-Head XuanTie C908 RISC-V main style. “Do you want a C908 SBC [Single-Board Computer] $30~$40?”

What makes the chip showcased by Sipeed fascinating is that it is major main, which runs at 1.6GHz, contains the RISC-V Vector Extension (RVV) 1. — the thoroughly-ratified version, alternatively than the previously pre-ratification .7.1 launch which at the time of crafting was the only edition to have built its way into commercially obtainable silicon. As a outcome, the chip ought to boast a significant increase in performance for applications which can make use of vector acceleration — like on-device machine studying workloads.

Sipeed has been unusually silent on precise particulars bordering the chip on which it designs to create a one-board personal computer, but a partially-redacted block diagram produced by the organization indicates it truly is an as-nevertheless unannounced Canaan Kendryte chip — complete with Kendryte Processing Unit (KPU), a focused equipment-understanding accelerator with 2MB of static RAM (SRAM).

The block diagram also reveals a 2nd processor core, working at 800MHz and without the need of the RVV extensions, a security subsystem with legitimate random selection generator (TRNG), a ability administration procedure, a multimedia subsystem with 3D depth motor and 2.5D graphics processor, support for DDR3L,LPDDR3, and LPDDR4 memory, an image sign processor (ISP) block, and two USB 2. ports, two SD/eMMC peripherals, SPI, I2C, UART, and up to 64 basic-reason input/output (GPIO) pins like 6 pulse-width modulation (PWM) channels and a 12-little bit analog to digital converter (ADC).

In a post to Reddit, previous SiFive developer Bruce Hoult disclosed a different trick up the chip’s sleeve: “[It] supports jogging RV32 [32-bit] code in Person mode (only) on an RV64 [64-bit] main,” he claims. “This is frequent on x86 and Arm but I really don’t know of any other RISC-V core that can do this. Arm, btw, has dropped this function from their 2023 and on Armv9-A cores. No question, I am going to be initial in line to plonk down $30-$40 for this kind of a machine!”

Sipeed has not nevertheless made available a start timetable for the new board, with intrigued events encouraged to comply with the firm’s Twitter account for additional info when it really is accessible.