StarFive VisionFive V1 RISC-V Single Board Computer on sale for $179

After the hype around BeagleBoard Foundation’s BeagleV StarFive RISC-V SBC, the cancellation came as a shock to the embedded developers’ space. However, as an alternative to the original RISC-V single-board computer and continuing most of its features, StarFive unveiled the VisionFive V1 late last year— now available for purchase on ALLNET China. The hardware comes with SiFive’s U74 64-bit RISC-V processor core which is comparable to the Arm Cortex-A55 processor.

At the heart of the single-board computer is the StarFive JH7100 system-on-chip tightly integrated with a dual-core RV64GC ISA U74 high-performance RISC-V application processor clocked at a frequency of 1.0GHz, capable of supporting a fully-featured operating system such as Linux. The SoC comes with Vision DSP Tensilica-VP6 for computing vision at 600MHz (VPU), an NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator, and a neural network engine. Incorporating 8GB of LPDDR4 memory, but no onboard storage, however, the manufacturer provides a MicroSD card slot. Even the LPDDR4 memory is divided into 2x 4GB clocked at 2800MHz, which restricts performance, unlike the totally integrated 8GB SDRAM.

Of course, with all the Neural Network Engine, NVLDA Engine and DSP, the board is a powerful piece of hardware for human-machine interface, smart home tech, surveillance, NAS, and even multimedia applications. The board comes with H.264/H.265 video decoder supporting up to 4Kp60 and dual-stream decoding up to 4Kp30 making it one of the most affordable choices for live streaming multimedia implementations.

It is very important to support various wireless connectivity protocols to take the benefit of the vision processing unit and neural network engine as most of the applications are deployed at the edge. To assist with such projects, the single board computer comes with 2.4GHz Wi-Fi IEEE802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.2 (BLE) wireless connectivity. Also, the onboard Gigabit Ethernet port lets the user share the mobile data connection with the VisionFive V1 SBC over the wired network connection.

On the software side, as mentioned earlier, the hardware is capable of running the Linux operating system with software compatibility for U-Boot Bootloader, GRUB2 Bootloader, Linux Kernel, OpenEuler, Fedora, OpenSBI Firmware. As of writing, the VisionFive V1 RISC-V Single Board Computer starter kit is available for purchase at $179.00 which includes the StarFive VisionFive V1 SBC, Heatsink with fan, and a 32GB SD card with pre-flashed Fedora OS.

Analysis

The hype around BeagleBoard Foundation’s BeagleV StarFive RISC-V SBC explains the demand for StarFive VisionFive V1 SBC due to its powerful system-on-chip and improved functionalities for most hobbyist and industrial projects. The board is seen as a general-purpose SBC reducing its capability to be exploited for one domain, like vision processing. Even though the hardware supports H264 and H265 video decoder, for live video streaming, the hardware requires more memory to process. SDRAM is split into 2 4x RAM, which limits performance and might not sustain processing for high video graphics.

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