VisionFive 2: RISC-V Quad Core Low Cost SBC 

That's exactly what I was hoping to hear! I've been waiting for some time to play with RISC-V hardware, and this board seems like the perfect opportunity to get involved.

While you were detailing the board's specifications I was wondering if that color mismatch might be one of the early bird / early revision quirks. It made no sense it would stay like that. But it's good things have been sorted out the best way, that is, upgrading to 4 USB 3.0 ports instead of just correcting the wrong color coding.

Yay - congratulations on being the first SBC reviewer who actually talks about software/driver support. Even if it is "it's not in Debian yet, and there are *problems* that we don't know how long it'll take to resolve, and no chance with Ubuntu or anything else for the foreseeable future". Better than pretending that there is support when there is none, like every other SBC review I watch.

@@ytfeelslikenorthkorea For me, I just need to know things like: "have the drivers and firmware made it into the real Linux Kernel repositories?" This board has an Imagination GPU, so I simply assume it's going to cause problems. There's no point buying something that boots to a blank screen, except when used with a hacked together "Engineering release" of Debian (presumably no-one is supporting that medium term). Maybe they'll get the drivers merged upstream... ...or maybe they won't. That they are shipping the boards, and the (already-two-years-old GPU) drivers are *not* upstream yet is an obvious red flag, so I'll wait until (if?) drivers are functional in standard Debian... you know just in case it never happens!

@@ytfeelslikenorthkorea Yes - to be fair, Imagination have promised to deliver Open Source Linux firmware and drivers, as opposed to just supplying Android modules for phone manufacturers to wire in. When that happens, and if this fairly old GPU is included in their promise, we will have a great RISC-V SBC. I suspect it will work out (otherwise StarFive messed up quite a bit)!

Greetings Jeff -- and agreed! :) I have already imagined you doing a video on the Lichee Cluster 4A (see lower down this page): sipeed.com/licheepi4a/ Now what would you do with 28 RISC-V cores . . .

@Good Ol' Slappy McGee I had planned on it, but honestly the 2nd half of 2022 was a bit of a blur since I kept going in and out of the hospital :( Ah well, I still have an Orange Pi 5 on the way, and I did order a VisionFive 2, but it probably won't come until February. It's okay though because I have plenty of other fun projects to kick off the year!

Time for RedShirtJeff to recompile for RISC. :)

@@nexusyang4832 except that it’ll probably gonna take a fraction of the time required compared to ARM as RISC-V is completely open source

Very relieved to see you returning to health, Jeff. Best wishes to you and your family for a better 2023. 😎

Agreed. The price is so important here.

I thought the price for the first RISC-V single board computers was insane. The RISC-V is open source so you are not paying extra for the licensing costs of ARM, so it should of been much cheaper. It finally is now.

@@GeekBoy03 It's not only licencing costs that makes a price.. The price had more to do with the development costs. And early adapters usually have to spend more.

@@GeekBoy03 It is indeed good that prices are now falling. But how the first board have been been much cheaper? Low- and first-run fabrication is never low cost -- licensing costs (or lack thereof) have nothing to do with it.. The first VisionFive SBC was very cheap compared to the RISC-V development board launched a few years earlier, which cost $1200. :)

@@ExplainingComputers from $1200 to only $51 today, the development speed of RISC-V SBCs is amazing, and i am all in for it

Indeed.

Certainly excited! :) Thanks for your generous support.

@@ExplainingComputers RU-vid colored the background brick red for his comment & your reply, that's pretty cool! 😅😅

We are, as so often, in agreement! :) I was very pleased to be able to install and test GPIO control. StarFive already have a pdf guide to using GPIO on the board, so are clearly going to support the maker market. I think a lot of people will want to experiment with a RISC-V project board, especially when Raspberry Pis remain in limited supply.

Erm, have they not been doing what you describe with the Raspberry Pi for over a decade already?

@@terrydaktyllus1320 And I have been a Pi fan for years. It's just tough to build new projects when you can't obtain the hardware to do it on! 😛

@@lesliedeana5142 But, with respect, that's not what you originally said. You said "I don't really care if there are pins on the board from manufacture if you can't do anything with it" - which, of course, is not correct for Raspberry Pi as the pins are both functional and well-documented. That's the point I was responding to. Sure, I accept there's a supply problem with the Pi and that people are looking for alternative boards instead - I entirely get that and it's why I build Gentoo Linux on my types of boards including Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, NanoPi Neo, some Olimex boards and even the Atomic Pi based on Intel Atom architecture. But you've now decided to answer an entirely different point that what you originally stated and, with respect, "Telepathy over TCP/IP" hasn't been invented yet - so I can only respond to words that you write, not the thoughts in your head. I do wish more people would stay on topic in these discussions!

@@terrydaktyllus1320 With respect, you are the one not on topic. Leslie was talking about a non PI board and others like it. Leslie agreed with your not on topic comment about PI SBCs, but her original comment was about the presentation of non PI boards with or without GPIO pins.

Greetings on another Sunday, and thanks for your support. Sorry about the Google trigger!

@@ExplainingComputers Hi, Chris! You're welcome. And you're very much okay; I thought the Google Nest Mini getting triggered and telling me what the weather is outside was funny! I should've recorded it but alas, I had to get ready for the day... It's not the first time this sort of thing happened.

Don't forget, that RISC 5 will allow for huge amounts of cores too (some Computer architecture professor in japan made one with 1012 cores!), and special computing devices like rendering engines, AI accelerators and more, all up to the hardware developers to use the RISC V architecture in any configurations and using any interconnects they see fit! The hard part of course is designing it all, as it is wicked complicated making micro architecture stuff and getting the clocks, temperatures, power supply and control... right and everything in sync. Plenty of room to make many rejects before finding the "secret sauce"!😅

Its really all about the players accepting lower margins to drive volume. The RISC V core itself is tiny. Someone could pop the cap on the chip and see the layout/blocks. Really be interesting to see some traditional benchmarks. The interesting thing about embedded design is it is bound by different requirements that traditional server, workstation, desktop computing. Things like battery life (multiple sleep modes), lots of IO and feature peripherals (counters, timers, interrupt structures) come into play. You prefer or may mandate fanless operation, etc. I hope they have a roadmap for some AI cores. The AI revolution is not trivial - it solves a major problem in the adoption. The AI stuff dates back to the early 1980's as well (Neural Nets) and is finally getting its day in the sun.

I suspect that the blue USB 2.0 ports may be because this is "super early bird hardware" -- and/or due to supply issues (ie they used what was available).

There's a new update btw, they changed the data sheet and corrected that that board is indeed using 4 usb 3 ports instead of what they suggested before that it was 2 usb 3 and 2 usb 2

@@STORMFIRE07 Yes, this is good news -- see the link in the pinned comment or video description.

Great ritual!

I will certainly be returning to this board -- and benchmarking against other SBCs -- once the software is final.

I think you underestimate the impact of the destruction of Huawei has had on the industry. Being open source, it is not beholden to any IP imports/exports. A nice safe bet for chipmakers.

@@chubbymoth5810 There is no question that import/export bans, restrictions, and tariffs will apply on RISC-V hardware once it's advanced enough. Remember that only the ISA itself is open source, not its actual implementations. This mitigates in part the effects of software ecosystem fragmentation that arise through trade wars, but hardware development in itself still still suffer.

@@chubbymoth5810 Huawei has been banned from the open source Android project. However, they did fork it and made their own ecosystem.

:)

Truly a match made in heaven

My dream is to have an entirely open source computer, hardware and all. The current paradigm does not allow for this. I wait with eager anticipation a RISC-V system with desktop-worthy performance, and it's getting there. I'm considering a pre-order just to tinker. Hopefully it will get there in the next 2-3 years.

open source is gonna have a tough time, but with all the developments so far, I share the same opinions as you guys

They have been behind risc-V for years. The problem here was the gpu driver, which is not Risc-V

@@trajectoryunown well, in practice it's only open source for chip makers. And at the moment it's pretty much impossible to verify that the hardware you ordered is what you wanted: Wednesday 11 00am Keynote Address Impedance Matching Expectations Between RISC V and the Open Har

"The lower price point will also help keep X86 and ARM prices more honest" Only if it gains serious market share. Which I have to say is unlikely. I know to many of the open source diehards feel the openness of the platform is a positive, in reality it's not going to have that much of an impact. I'm a massive fan of Linux and use it as my daily driver os but not really a fan of open source in general. To me it's more important that it works than if I can see the sorce.

Thanks

Thanks Paul.

Thanks for your support Alan, most appreciated. I was very surprised indeed when the VisionFive 2 arrived last Tuesday. I thought I'd just be handed a package containing an Orange Pi 5. And I started scripting for that! Then I opened the box . . . :)

Good luck with your new board!

Greetings -- and yes, there will be more RISC-V content here in 2023. :)

You are clearly a pioneer!

Now that is a good spot in the intro. I updated the titles when I did my channel update in early December 2022. But I decided I was not happy with the colour scheme I used for the Custard Pi. So those new titles did not last very long -- and were updated for this video as you noticed! But they will revert back and forth a couple of times, as some uploaded content (like next week's video) still has the old new titles.

Their pricing is nothing but pie-in-the-sky hopes and dreams. You won't be buying this board anytime soon, and certainly not for the $51 they claim.

I share your excitement! I saw that Google wants to make RISC-V a Tier 1 platform -- for others: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-official-android-support-for-risc-v/ I suspect we will see RISC-V application beyond embedded and microcontrollers accelerate in the next year or two.

@@ExplainingComputers Exciting times ahead.

@Good Ol' Slappy McGee Sweet, have fun with it man. Yeah, I think I will have to get me one o these as well.

Too bad Google appropriated Linux in order to make their Android spyware platform! If they where genuinely into open source they would have just contributed to Linux and helped make it better, no "Android" needed, but that is not at all what they have in mind! They are using "open source" as a shield to keep up their agenda and get away with it easier. I don't trust them nor Microsoft for a second! Hopefully RISC 5 will open the door to way more open source software and hardware, and break dependence on companies that lock shit down and make people pay for being tools they can spy on, track, influence, and indoctrinate at will!

@@Bob-of-Zoid Android IS open source dude. Google doesn't own it. What Google owns is the Play Store app. Google does have their own flavour of Android that they use on their devices, but so does Samsung and most of the other companies that ship devices with Android. And yes, they do inject "spyware" into their flavours of Android. And Google does contribute heavily to both Android and Linux projects as well as many other open source projects. It is in their interest to do so as all their devices rely on this software. Both Android and Chrome OS use the Linux kernel. So by supporting both Android and Linux projects they reap the rewards of those projects advancing, innovating and becoming more secure and stable. We also get to reap the rewards as we get to use the software for free. It is win/win. Literally hundreds of operating systems use the Linux kernel across billions and billions of devices. From Android and Chrome OS through all the brands of Linux you've heard of like Debian, Fedora, Mint etc to most firmware that runs on routers and IOT devices. The whole point of Linux is to be free and open source to allow for innovation and competition against Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and now Apple as well. Google has every right to use the RISC-V ISA as it is open source. But as such, they must abide by the open source license. It is a good thing when big corporations adopt open source products as it increases market share and by extension brings funding and support to the projects. I don't know what you mean by 'Google are using open source as a shield to keep up their agenda to get away with something'. So I'll just say this: Yes Google and Microsoft are evil. As is Apple and the majority of the worlds largest corporations. Yes these companies infringe on the intellectual property of others. Look at what Microsoft is doing with code from GITHub at the moment. And Google did totally rip off parts of the Java API which is owned by Oracle. Apple totally ripped of BSD to make MacOS. I'm not saying these companies aren't pieces of crap, but Google cannot achieve some grand evil plan by adopting open source products. Well other than saving money on licensed products I guess. As well as I suppose RnD on developing new ones. But that is technically just good business. So I don't really understand what your point is over all. I mean, I'm right there with you against spyware, tracking, data collection, locked down ecosystems and indoctrination and all that jazz. But I think you are perhaps not well enough informed about how open source works, as your statement is not accurate and doesn't really make sense. Google adopting RISC-V absolutely IS a good thing, regardless of how much of a piece of crap company Google is. It means that development for the ISA will go through the roof. Especially as Google adopts R5 for their mobile devices. Android has a market share of over 80%, which means that there will be a great deal of incentive for developers to accommodate R5. Especially as the Open Source Android Project is already adopting R5 support. Which is what devs use as the foundation for their flavours of Android. EDIT: Meant to say this as well: If you want a mobile device that doesnt have spyware or tracking and is privacy based, but still have the experience of a flagship OS like Android, go check out Graphene OS. IT IS AWESOME AND I LOVE IT!!!!!

Greetings Steve.

Hi Jen, and I will most certainly be doing this. I plan to return to the board when at least one final release distro is available, and to run benchmarks against a Pi 3 and a Pi 4. And I am still planning a "RISC-V Week" video -- probably in the second half of 2023 -- when the software is more refined and stable. :)

Greetings Perry. This board will certainly appear in more videos. Not least, when there is final release software, I will benchmark against a Pi 3 and Pi 4. :)

@@ExplainingComputers Wonderful, looking forward to that future video! (edit) videos!

:)

Yes, RISC is good.

no. RISC flops/Watt is worse. Also many cool things are already patented by intel/amd and risc cannot use them.

Thanks Oliver, most appreciated. :)

Cool. :)

Greetings Leslie! :) I hope that all is well with you.

It is a step back, because Nezha Sipeed Risc-V had wifi and blutooth included and working out of the box.

@Tony And a blutooth dongle also, with only 2 usp that means I need a hub and all of this won't be working out of the box. This is why Apple has destroyed Windows, they have the stuff that we need working out of the box.

@user-gs4vx3bg3w I think he meant two left after two dongles. Sad I have to explain it to such a helpful person

But all the other Risc-V SBC have this feature. I don't know anyone who still plug something in their computer. NO ONE.

@Tony You must be american, we in civilized Canada use only Wifi in our homes and industries.

Agreed. They are really trying to help users.

I could not get video playback in either a browser or locally. I did manage to install VLC media player, but it would not run.

Greetings Brian! :)

I agree, exciting times -- with a lot of new RISC-V hardware to check out in the relatively near future!

:)

There are some very small PCIE 4.0 x8 connectors that are designed for use inside of a server chassis. You could hook those up on a board like this as long as you have some extra support for the connector as the pins are very small as is.

That is my hope too. The hardware and price are now there.