Open hardware company Pine64 has made a name for itself in recent years by offering low-cost, hacker-friendly hardware including smartphones, laptops,

Pine64 is working on a RISC-V single-board computer

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2022-07-01 18:30:12

Open hardware company Pine64 has made a name for itself in recent years by offering low-cost, hacker-friendly hardware including smartphones, laptops, and single-board computers sporting ARM-based processors.

But Pine64 has also dabbled in RISC-V architecture. The Pinecil smart soldering iron has a RISC-V chip. So does the Pinecone IoT dev board. Now the company says it’s preparing to launch a single-board computer (SBC) that will be its most powerful RISC-V powered device yet.

While Pine64 hasn’t provided detailed specs yet (some are still being worked out), the company says that the upcoming SBC have a RISC-V chip that offers comparable performance to the Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor at the heart of Pine64’s Quartz64 board.

The RISC-V board will be available with 4GB or 8GB of RAM and features support for USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, and a PCIe slot. And while Pine64 hasn’t revealed which RISC-V processor it’s using yet, the company notes that that the chip features an Imagination Technologies BXE-2-32 GPU which is designed for “entry-level” and “mid-range” applications and for which Imagination plans to make source code available soon.