Yes, he goes above and beyond the call of duty. Certainly a model and inspiration for teachers. Suddenly playing around with little electronic gizmo things seems like a whole lot of fun.
I had many wonderful teachers while I was in school. So I've quite a high standard to compare to, and yes, Chris is top flight. Perhaps among those he inspires will be a new generation of excellent teachers.
@@boink800 Even if the “roots” are both from the 1980s (and BTW, I couldn’t find any connection between the two, so not sure what you mean by “the same roots”), that doesn’t mean it isn’t new. It’d be like saying ARMv9 isn’t new because its roots are from the 1980s. And I also didn’t find anything saying RISC-V is a branch of ARM.
I'm very excited by RISC-V. What your are doing, teaching us about it and Linux, is really important. This is not just about open source computing, it is also about freedom. Thanks a lot, Chris.
I'm excited for the future of the RISC-V architecture. However, the performance of all RISC-V based chips leaves a bit to be desired, to put it nicely, even when comparing like for like to say ARM based solutions. I know it's early days, but I do hope they begin making big strides in this department, so that more people will see it as a viable platform for general computing.
Presently it seems like a somewhat worthless novelty, but with another decade or so of development, who knows? Maybe it will reach parity with the Pi computers and other platforms. The fact that it's entirely open and customizable is nice, but it really does need to get better for performance.
@@sbrazenor2 From what I understand it takes an awful amount of money to set up a chip manufacturing plant, so an open architecture who will pay for the machinery to make it? It will always be behind propriety chips because of the expense of manufacture, it is not like Linux where all you need is £100 computer and start coding.
Thank you for this video. This the first video of yours I've seen and I quite appreciate you taking a few extra seconds to mention the full names of features as well as the acronyms. That definitely speeds up my retention and ability to further research things for myself. I'm not a tech natural, but enjoy tinkering and a little extra help does not go amiss.
Good to see Debian working on RISC-V. I seriously hope this shakes up the market, and makes these tiny boards even more viable as a pocketable PC. I wouldn't overextend my expectations on that, but it's still nice to see.
I got a pinephone with the real keyboard, and that's pretty much what I use it as -- a complete pocketable PC. It's no speed demon, but runs Manjaro/KDE well enough. I also got the multiboot card that's available for it, but haven't played with it yet.
Very professionally presented piece of kit, from the packaging onwards. It's expensive for what it presents to a consumer, (1 USB-2, 1 Ethernet), but reasonably priced for a dev board. (Inevitably, small production volumes at first mean high prices). Copying the Pi's footprint means aftermarket stuff will fit. The obvious question is when will the Pi people get on board the RISC-V train? If they want to keep up the undergraduate meat supply, they're going to need to be where the development is happening.
Raspberry Pi are a strategic member of RISC-V International, the governing body for RISC-V. I love your phrase "undergraduate meat supply". And you have to be right about this.
Definitely the Nezha RISC-V SBC is a development board. I am impressed that it is the same size as the Raspberry Pi and equally impressed that you got it running on a distro that supported HDMI. I am really eager to see more RISC-V content on your channel and hope there are a great many others out there that feel the same.
There are many more boards already and even more announced. Look for MangoPi, DongshanPi, ClockworkPi (they all have made/announced D1/D1s boards) and what Sipeed are posting on Twitter (they have the Lichee RV module + various carrier boards + more to come).
what is ssad, is that it didn't shown other application than web browsers. Browser are sadly all unusable, but most application run fluently, even on 20€ LicheeRV.
@@ThePopolong Far more interesting is low-level development. We know that porting to RISC-V requires work still and the current chips are not suitable for that high a load. For consumers, there are already lots of other options. Contribute to development, and you can see the same appear on other platforms later, such as RISC-V.
Amazing video series, Chris B. That iso which came with the board was a bummer. But, thank goodness you've got the HDMI out working. (That was a full tinkerer's board vibe. 👍) And wish you an amazing week !
Thanks for this. I'm just working on the "Explaining RISC-V" video that pulls all this together. Currently slated for early May. Other things happen before then -- including the release of Ubuntu 22.04. :)
Looking forward to your RISC-V video. RISC-V + Linux = Freedom (in a utopian world). (Edit: You can't have a truly secure computing without an open source ISA such as RISC-V. Again another UTOPIA; Secure Computing).
Thanks a lot Christopher, and already looking forward to your "Explaining Risc-V" video; it is indeed a very substantial 'revolution' that now seems to get going. Great!
HAH .. I just saw this last night on Aliexpress, and just now mentioned getting one on the latest T2 Linux live video, and this video turned out to be the 1st in my YT list :)
Watching this, I remember the excitement 40+ years ago when anything working on a computer was an achievement; even just a command prompt! I'm now an old git and have a list of "will this ever happen in my lifetime?" events. Will EDF ever get a nuclear reactor working, will HS2 get to Manchester, will we ever see Pi 5! - you get the idea. A serious RISC-V computer is now on my list; I'm guessing about 2025 but am open to some sort of accelerated development. RISC-V better than Pi for the same price is a harder guess - but when it happens, I know I'll see it on Explaining Computers.
Thanks for this, great post. And I think it will be before 2025. My guess (based on recent communications with manufacturers) would be late 2022 for the first low-cost RISC-V Linux SBCs with quad core CPUs and a GPU, and more powerful RISC-V boards than that in 2023. :)
Thanks Steve. THe "Explaiining RISC-V" video is not ready to go, but a few other things will appear here before then. Not least a video on Ubuntu 22.04. :)
@@dankierson The easy availability of standard and good compilers is one of the main reasons why you would use RISC-V as the basis for some specialised CPU rather than design your own instruction set from scratch. Historically, most complex chips have had a myriad of tiny CPUs on them controlling various aspects of hardware operation and rather than negotiate with ARM or xTensa (Cadence) about each one it was common for chip designers to just make something up (invariably inferior .. e.g. nVIdia Falcon). Now they can just use or at least start from RISC-V. GCC for RISC-V was developed in parallel with designing the ISA, back in 2010-2015. RISC-V has never *not* had GCC. LLVM for RISC-V got a serious start in 2017 and the first reasonably complete and easy to install version was published in October 2018. Today LLVM is arguably better than GCC and is where most new extensions of features get implemented first. Having GCC and LLVM optimisers and back ends available enables many other compilers that use their infrastructure e.g. Go and Rust.
Very cool indeed. Being a development board, it suggested to me that it might not be easy for a home-user, and so it went down. But then you're not the average bear are you? Instead you're a teacher and very good one indeed. Personally, I am very happy about your good health in these trying times, and hope you keep smiling and learning because then so do I learn new things. I intend to keep on learning until they pry my Linux system from my cold dead hands, and you make that a very enjoyable thing to do, so Bless You!
I really like these RISC-V boards. They're surprisingly advanced for what's a completely new technology essentially. It's *similar* right now to what we expect from ARM, but it may eventually surpass it in some fields too, since we have ISA control, something we have with no other architecture. I also like your explanation of the architecture, its infancy, and optimism regarding its future. These are really informative videos.
chris thank you very much for your time and efforts. Nice to see you again with a new video. always a pleasure to view. I learn so much by just watching you. God Bless Mike
Never mind the interesting SBC... by way of your link to the working Debian image, I eventually landed on a nice TREE utility for linux, and was happy to find it already in our repository. So however indirectly, today this video was exactly what I needed! A bit late getting my Sunday fix today, but as always well worth my time. (Also, that's a nicely set up Debian. Perhaps we can explore it further?)
I am looking forward to this series. The promise of RISC quickly followed the microprocessor development kit releases by Zilog, Intel, Motorola, etc. in the 70's, but almost 50 years later, I am still waiting for it to take over the world. RISC seems to become popular for a while, even making its way into specialized computers, then becomes dormant, only to repeat the cycle again. I really don't have many years remaining in this life, but I am hopeful that the wonders of RISC will be revealed to me in the next life...wherever that is...or in your next several videos.
It's only 40 years since RISC was developed (or at least named) and it HAS taken over the world. Those Androids and iPhones in everyone's pockets today are all RISC-based, as are current generation Apple laptops and desktop computers (all except the Mac Pro).
Another very well put-together video that I am sure meant a lot to tech-savvy developers and tinkerers, but which to me was just an interesting way to learn that this is not for me. Never mind, it's always worth my while watching your videos even though I have too little tech-know-how to understand quite why this is not better than, say, a Raspberry Pi 4 for me. Just a few more great videos like this one and I will be on my way to choosing a simple but reliable backup for my old laptop which runs Linux Mint 20. Thanks a lot.
In my world, AWOL is Absent WithOut Leave. Skimped a bit on the USB I feel. Another SCB with a full size HDMI. Come on Pi Foundation, keep up! Another easy listen from CB.
My Sunday morning routine, watch EC, coffee & toast. In that order. Nice to see something completely new in the world of SBC’s. Time for my second cup and to watch the video one more time. 👍🏼
I'm very interested in RISC V - really glad you cover SBC development on your channel. I reckon it will be particularly the Chinese manufacturers that invest into R&D of this technology to build up an alternative to x86 and Arm architecture to become independent of potential embargoes. Therefore I have mixed feelings about it. That aside they are still costly even to recent Raspberry Pi 4 market prices.😅
This is certainly just the beginning, The Pi sells in the tens of millions each year so obviously it has economies of scale. IMO a RISC V board will need an Octacore processor and 4GB RAM minimum for it to go mainstream, and they're 1 to 2 years away from that yet. Of course the Raspberry Pi foundation may take a dip into RISC V themselves. Still open computing will benefit everyone, as it won't allow any one nation to use access to technology as a political weapon.
I was disappointed that I didn't see a video from EC at 9AM. It turns out the channel got accidentally unsubscibed in a purge of channels I susbscribe to with no videos in a year. I corrected that quickly after a search. I'm glad to see that there is starting to be some standardisation of board size. It would be nifty if there ws more standardisation of port locations. It would increase the peripheral options for all boards.
Another interesting SBC video from Chris @ E.C. my Sunday is now complete I look forward to the next video. I'm intrigued about the development of RISC-V and where this will lead us in the future, I thought it was a shame that the Debian supplied couldn't output to HDMI, hopefully they'll rectify that. The USB-C OTG socket is an interesting one that I've read about that allows USB devices, tablets or smartphones, to act as a host, allowing other USB devices such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, mouse or keyboards, to be attached to them, the standard was developed in 2001 back in the dim and distant past!! :)
I might grab one of these boards out of curiosity, however will definitely try to run GNU/Linux Debian as server (without GUI), this little board could be interesting for some little home automation :$ Have a great week ahead and keep it up the great job
I look forward to the continuation of this series. So far it seems like a step down from where other architecture is, but I'm sure there's a reason you are excited about it.
Greetings Chris. I don't think it's a standard pinout -- it's for a six microphone array (the kind of thing you find in a smart speaker), and I don't think there are standards for those yet, but I may be wrong.
Thanks a lot Chris (Where is Jeff?), haaaaa, I am so jealous... I want to do some Risc V things this year, pretty sure this is THE year, and waiting your next video. Thanks again.
This is indeed the year for RISC-V stuff. There are going to be second-generation RISC-V SBCs later in 2022 with a lot more power for a lot less money.
I find your videos interesting and informative. The RISC-V seems a technology with a future. The only computer I have is an Asus Chromebook but would like a Raspberry Pi 400 and a Windows computer.
I've just found this comment -- highlighted as you are a channel member! :) And the answer is, not yet. But I'm sure they will at some point be a RISC-V version of Windows, just as there is now an ARM version.
Back in the early 90's, my older sister worked on a Cray super computer based on RISC architecture for simulation purposes. It was already 64 bits and cooled with liquid nitrogen... The casing was matte black with blood red writtings. Gorgeous monoliths. 😅 That was the first time I heard about RISC architecture. Except specific applications like the DEC Alpha, I didn't heard much about RISC's plateforms... Can't wait to hear more about.
Although RISC-V is in its early stages of development, soon it will take over the lead and leave the ARM ISC far behind to become the be-all and end-all ISC solution out there. RISC-V is the future, ARM is not. I'm slightly sceptical about the development of the proprietary extensions because of the license conditions of this CPU architecture. It may be possible for the manufacturers to create custom extensions that they'd like to keep private and prefer not to contribute their versions back to the Open Source community. It has happened in history if we look back and see how the ARM ISC that we see today has evolved. Nevertheless, if big players like Texas Instruments and NVIDIA (with an open mind) come to develop RISC-V, we might see the next generation of computing very soon. But the corporations I mentioned have never been very friendly towards the Open Source community. NVDIA's hostility to the free software movement is an unforgettable historical chapter in the world of computers. I'll add one more thing to assure you, the analogue-digital hybrid types of Logic Processing Units are on the way which will declare the D-Day to today's practical general-purpose computers. They will have an analogue Matrix Multiplier Unit, an analogue Differential Equation Solver Unit, a different kind of analogue Adder and so on. They won't consume that much energy as compared to today's hard-to-afford ultra-high-end GPUs. Training the AI models from a data set will be a thing done in the blink of an eye. Today's digital-only type computers will be a thing of the past. Since RISC-V is an open architecture, only it can help us to get there by stripping down the R&D expenditure. 👍👍
as there are multiple RISC-V boards showing up, that are rather well decked out in capability, it would be interesting to see them compared side by side and bench-marked and what does it take to get setup to do RISC-V in a cross-development manner from a luxuriant desktop computer (preferably Linux)? even if these boards can run a graphical Linux desktop, well 1GHz CPU and 1GB or memory is not at all a viable development platform for the IDE tool suites that I'm accustomed to using in the day job - a tutorial on doing such RISC-V cross-development would be a welcome topic to be covered thanks for covering RISC-V
i guess the way to go is: develop and compile on a reasonably powerfull desktop PC, then take whatever you compiled over to the real riscV hardware and see if it works
It just works, all crosscompile tools are available on most main Linux Distribtions. You can even run RISC-V debian or ubuntu on Qemu on a x86 system to test it, but cross compile will be faster than compiling on qemu ^^. Sadly this demo shown only the browser, all web browser are really slow on the D1, don't know why for, most other applications just run fine. The video decoding was not mainlined 1 month ago, but it should be done now, it use the same video decoder than on other Allwinner chips, so not so hard to have it working :).
Don't know where else to ask this (it's about the Raspberry Pi). I see that Raspberry Pi OS Buster has just been updated to use Wayland - I wonder what kind of video playback you would get now? Hopefully a decrease in dropped frames.
Yes, there is now experimental Wayland support in Bullseye (not Buster) for those wishing to experiment! How this works with GPU accelerated video playback in a browser I've no idea -- but I would imagine for now that the best playback is obtained in the standard version of Bullseye -- which certainly improved on that in Buster (and Legacy, as Buster has become). Interesting times!
A few questions. First specific to the chip. You talked about the DSP inside it. Is that open source too? More specifie to open source ISAs generally, what specifically is the benefit to me generally? I don't pay licensing fees to any ISAs directly, I just receive it in the cost of my chip or board. What amount am I paying for that license? Is it a significant part of my cost? If it isn't, should I really care? What other value to me is it giving me?
The PCB silkscreen seems to have been done at a weird 25-30° angle. See 4:26. I wonder why. It's OK for a prototype but I've seen better on cheap $5 PCBs.
I've yet to decide on reviewing the Orange Pi 4TLS, as it is very similar to the Organge Pi 4 (it is basically the same board, minus the onboard eMMC, and with the option of 3GB of RAM as well as 4GB (the same as the Orange Pi 4).
I managed to make everything work on mine. It took me 8 hours to install the proper image with their horrible burning software and 4 hours of configuring everything on it : proper path for apt, setting locales, creating proper account, installing mosh, installing gdb, git, emacs... Now it works perfectly with my iPad BLINK and from the television. If you need help, you can ask me in this comment, I will try to help you.
Jeez Louise... How do you get your hands on such nice toys? I was trying to get the Berkely out of order machine RISC-V core running on my FPGA dev board. I was also trying to get my own basic integer machine together, but... After hours of work on a decoder stage.... I kinda got a bit discouraged....
@@ExplainingComputers it's really fantastic that you bust out your personal wallet for these reviews. It really is quite appreciated. Oh, and thanks for the link!
I really hope RISC-V will see widespread development and adoption
Yeah some of the Micro Magic chips are phenomenal. 1Watt at 5Ghz and 10mW at 1Ghz.
Already is. It's insane how much. nVidia GPU's are largely RISC-V already
Would you still want one after china puts their spyware in them?
It will.
It's really catching on already, it's quite exciting to see how many options are already available in the embedded space.
I wish I had teachers like you when I was in school
You explain everything clearly.
Yes, he goes above and beyond the call of duty. Certainly a model and inspiration for teachers. Suddenly playing around with little electronic gizmo things seems like a whole lot of fun.
I had a most excellent Technology teacher at school, Mr Mayor, he invented the upright kettle!
I did.
Don't we all.
I had many wonderful teachers while I was in school. So I've quite a high standard to compare to, and yes, Chris is top flight. Perhaps among those he inspires will be a new generation of excellent teachers.
Amazing to see these early stages of a new CPU architecture
New? Both RISC-V and ARM have the same roots, from the 1980's. RISC-V is the open source branch of ARM.
@@boink800 What are you talking about? RISC-V began in 2010, not the 1980s. And it has no relation to ARM other than being a RISC ISA.
@@GRBtutorials It seems your reading comprehension is not that good. Read what I wrote again, then check Wikipedia.
@@boink800 Even if the “roots” are both from the 1980s (and BTW, I couldn’t find any connection between the two, so not sure what you mean by “the same roots”), that doesn’t mean it isn’t new. It’d be like saying ARMv9 isn’t new because its roots are from the 1980s. And I also didn’t find anything saying RISC-V is a branch of ARM.
@@GRBtutorials Read it again. No, I will not draw you a picture.
Sunday is always my favourite day of the week because that is when a brand new ExplainingComputers video is released!
I totally agree to this.
Great to hear!
Definitely, just after lunch :-)
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Hopefully, app designers will soon add RISC-V packages to the repositories to make these even more useful.
Laughs in gentoo
Krita even have one! They recently added build support for RISC-V
> _"Laughs in gentoo"_
@@Silverdev2482 why??
@@yash1152 gentoo compiles everything thing from source so most packages can work on weird architectures
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It seems that many Chinese companies are working hard on getting RISC-V more and more developed. Great news.
China does not want to be tied to western technology such as x86 or arm that someone like Trump can kill their economy any time he has a bad day.
The CCP doesn't want to rely too much on closed-source ISAa from the west, which are x86 and ARM mostly. They have no choice but to embrace RISC-V.
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I'm very excited by RISC-V. What your are doing, teaching us about it and Linux, is really important. This is not just about open source computing, it is also about freedom.
Thanks a lot, Chris.
:pony
I'm excited for the future of the RISC-V architecture. However, the performance of all RISC-V based chips leaves a bit to be desired, to put it nicely, even when comparing like for like to say ARM based solutions. I know it's early days, but I do hope they begin making big strides in this department, so that more people will see it as a viable platform for general computing.
Presently it seems like a somewhat worthless novelty, but with another decade or so of development, who knows? Maybe it will reach parity with the Pi computers and other platforms. The fact that it's entirely open and customizable is nice, but it really does need to get better for performance.
Apparantly Intel has a Risc core hidden away in most of its processors, something I was not aware of until recently
@@sbrazenor2 From what I understand it takes an awful amount of money to set up a chip manufacturing plant, so an open architecture who will pay for the machinery to make it? It will always be behind propriety chips because of the expense of manufacture, it is not like Linux where all you need is £100 computer and start coding.
i expect the compiler needs to improve too, for purely "embedded/headless" seems alright
@@tonysheerness2427 Do you think ARM pay for fabs?
Thanks, just a few shillings from the coffers. Many thanks for your videos. J
Thanks for your support, most appreciated. :)
Thank you for this video. This the first video of yours I've seen and I quite appreciate you taking a few extra seconds to mention the full names of features as well as the acronyms. That definitely speeds up my retention and ability to further research things for myself. I'm not a tech natural, but enjoy tinkering and a little extra help does not go amiss.
Thanks for watching. :)
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Good to see Debian working on RISC-V. I seriously hope this shakes up the market, and makes these tiny boards even more viable as a pocketable PC. I wouldn't overextend my expectations on that, but it's still nice to see.
I got a pinephone with the real keyboard, and that's pretty much what I use it as -- a complete pocketable PC. It's no speed demon, but runs Manjaro/KDE well enough. I also got the multiboot card that's available for it, but haven't played with it yet.
I agree in principle but find things underpowered and sluggish at the moment.
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Very professionally presented piece of kit, from the packaging onwards. It's expensive for what it presents to a consumer, (1 USB-2, 1 Ethernet), but reasonably priced for a dev board. (Inevitably, small production volumes at first mean high prices).
Copying the Pi's footprint means aftermarket stuff will fit.
The obvious question is when will the Pi people get on board the RISC-V train? If they want to keep up the undergraduate meat supply, they're going to need to be where the development is happening.
Raspberry Pi are a strategic member of RISC-V International, the governing body for RISC-V. I love your phrase "undergraduate meat supply". And you have to be right about this.
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Definitely the Nezha RISC-V SBC is a development board. I am impressed that it is the same size as the Raspberry Pi and equally impressed that you got it running on a distro that supported HDMI. I am really eager to see more RISC-V content on your channel and hope there are a great many others out there that feel the same.
There are many more boards already and even more announced.
Look for MangoPi, DongshanPi, ClockworkPi (they all have made/announced D1/D1s boards) and what Sipeed are posting on Twitter (they have the Lichee RV module + various carrier boards + more to come).
@@CyReVolt Wonderful!
what is ssad, is that it didn't shown other application than web browsers. Browser are sadly all unusable, but most application run fluently, even on 20€ LicheeRV.
@@ThePopolong Far more interesting is low-level development. We know that porting to RISC-V requires work still and the current chips are not suitable for that high a load. For consumers, there are already lots of other options. Contribute to development, and you can see the same appear on other platforms later, such as RISC-V.
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Finally, investing in a RISKy business can actually be a good thing. Very COoL. Dunka.
I always enjoy the SBC videos the most on your channel.
Cool. I like making them too. :)
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Amazing video series, Chris B. That iso which came with the board was a bummer. But, thank goodness you've got the HDMI out working. (That was a full tinkerer's board vibe. 👍)
And wish you an amazing week !
Thanks for this. I'm just working on the "Explaining RISC-V" video that pulls all this together. Currently slated for early May. Other things happen before then -- including the release of Ubuntu 22.04. :)
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You’re question at the end was what I was thinking about while watching your video. Awesome
I love how well this gentleman explains in small words, sharply and clearly.
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Looking forward to your RISC-V video. RISC-V + Linux = Freedom (in a utopian world). (Edit: You can't have a truly secure computing without an open source ISA such as RISC-V. Again another UTOPIA; Secure Computing).
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Thanks for explaining this RISC-V board to us. Your videos are very helpful. I have watched your videos for many years.
Thanks for watching. :)
You're The King Of The SBC's! Maybe On The Edge Of A New Era In Computing! One Day We'll Be Like 'Anon', The Movie (2018)!
Greetings! :)
great work as usual...and you also took the time to explain how to fix the hdmi issue in the notes of the video. excellent.
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I'll never get tired of taking.... a closer look 💪🙏
Excellent! :)
hopefully there will be another one ... VERy soon.
@@BruceHoult I hope so too. The Mango Pi MQ Pro looks a very interesting RISC-V (D1) board for $20.
Thanks a lot Christopher, and already looking forward to your "Explaining Risc-V" video; it is indeed a very substantial 'revolution' that now seems to get going. Great!
It's great to see you so excited about RISC-V Christopher. All the best mate.
Thanks. :)
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Amaizing video! Very cool stuff! 😊
HAH .. I just saw this last night on Aliexpress, and just now mentioned getting one on the latest T2 Linux live video, and this video turned out to be the 1st in my YT list :)
Watching this, I remember the excitement 40+ years ago when anything working on a computer was an achievement; even just a command prompt! I'm now an old git and have a list of "will this ever happen in my lifetime?" events. Will EDF ever get a nuclear reactor working, will HS2 get to Manchester, will we ever see Pi 5! - you get the idea.
A serious RISC-V computer is now on my list; I'm guessing about 2025 but am open to some sort of accelerated development. RISC-V better than Pi for the same price is a harder guess - but when it happens, I know I'll see it on Explaining Computers.
Thanks for this, great post. And I think it will be before 2025. My guess (based on recent communications with manufacturers) would be late 2022 for the first low-cost RISC-V Linux SBCs with quad core CPUs and a GPU, and more powerful RISC-V boards than that in 2023. :)
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This new digital journey is already shaping up to be particularly exciting! Thank you in advance!
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Thanks for another great video Chris. I'm looking forward to the next one 'Explaining RISC-V'.
Thanks Steve. THe "Explaiining RISC-V" video is not ready to go, but a few other things will appear here before then. Not least a video on Ubuntu 22.04. :)
@@ExplainingComputers
Excellent. You're right on top of the new stuff, as usual. Thanks for all the hard work.
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Your best review yet!
Thanks! :)
Looking forward to your description of RISC v. I'm interested in how the instruction set can happen and what I can use it for.
Me too!
You can use it for anything you want. It's a general-purpose instruction set.
@@BruceHoult Provided compilers for the RISC-V CPU are available.
@@dankierson The easy availability of standard and good compilers is one of the main reasons why you would use RISC-V as the basis for some specialised CPU rather than design your own instruction set from scratch. Historically, most complex chips have had a myriad of tiny CPUs on them controlling various aspects of hardware operation and rather than negotiate with ARM or xTensa (Cadence) about each one it was common for chip designers to just make something up (invariably inferior .. e.g. nVIdia Falcon). Now they can just use or at least start from RISC-V. GCC for RISC-V was developed in parallel with designing the ISA, back in 2010-2015. RISC-V has never *not* had GCC. LLVM for RISC-V got a serious start in 2017 and the first reasonably complete and easy to install version was published in October 2018. Today LLVM is arguably better than GCC and is where most new extensions of features get implemented first. Having GCC and LLVM optimisers and back ends available enables many other compilers that use their infrastructure e.g. Go and Rust.
@@BruceHoult Thanks for info. RISC-V, FPGA, LLVM - Freedom here we come.
I look forward to learning more about RISC-V.
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I love your SBC videos. Thanks for bringing the reviews.
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Love your channel! Keep up the good work.
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Super excited about "a new era of Open computing"!!
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Is good to see now that Risc-V is start flying
Nice Video! A very interesting detail about the Allwinner D1 SoC is, that it implements RISC-V Vector extension (RVV Draft 0.7.1).
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Very cool indeed. Being a development board, it suggested to me that it might not be easy for a home-user, and so it went down. But then you're not the average bear are you? Instead you're a teacher and very good one indeed. Personally, I am very happy about your good health in these trying times, and hope you keep smiling and learning because then so do I learn new things. I intend to keep on learning until they pry my Linux system from my cold dead hands, and you make that a very enjoyable thing to do, so Bless You!
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So exciting to see a monopoly breaker like this, thanks Chris for your video.
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Great video! I’d really love to see another sbc week video. Maybe a raspberry pi 400 week, or any other risc V week? Always enjoy your content!
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Thanks for your work. Greetings from Ottawa.
Greetings from the UK!
The ‘ol’ does not stand for open learning, but online. The Chinese characters on the box are 全志在线 (quanzhi zaixian), or ‘Allwinner Online.
Thanks for this, most appreciated. I stand corrected.
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…another great video, Chris, thank you…and I’m looking forward to the RISC-V videos ahead…
I really like these RISC-V boards. They're surprisingly advanced for what's a completely new technology essentially. It's *similar* right now to what we expect from ARM, but it may eventually surpass it in some fields too, since we have ISA control, something we have with no other architecture.
I also like your explanation of the architecture, its infancy, and optimism regarding its future. These are really informative videos.
1 one year they reach the level than ARM took 10 years to reach :).
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chris thank you very much for your time and efforts. Nice to see you again with a new video. always a pleasure to view. I learn so much by just watching you. God Bless Mike
Thanks Mike.
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Extraordinary! 👍 Thank you for reviewing this RISC-V 'puter. While it will take some iterations, this is deliciously promising! Truly yours.
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Nezha, is from Chinese mythology
and Xuantie, direct translate to English is black iron, but it is similar idea with Adamantine
Never mind the interesting SBC... by way of your link to the working Debian image, I eventually landed on a nice TREE utility for linux, and was happy to find it already in our repository. So however indirectly, today this video was exactly what I needed!
A bit late getting my Sunday fix today, but as always well worth my time. (Also, that's a nicely set up Debian. Perhaps we can explore it further?)
I'm glad that you found a link useful! :)
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Your videos are amazing and helpful for someone to understand something. Keep going!
Thank you! Will do!
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I am looking forward to this series. The promise of RISC quickly followed the microprocessor development kit releases by Zilog, Intel, Motorola, etc. in the 70's, but almost 50 years later, I am still waiting for it to take over the world. RISC seems to become popular for a while, even making its way into specialized computers, then becomes dormant, only to repeat the cycle again. I really don't have many years remaining in this life, but I am hopeful that the wonders of RISC will be revealed to me in the next life...wherever that is...or in your next several videos.
keep on waitin'....
It's only 40 years since RISC was developed (or at least named) and it HAS taken over the world. Those Androids and iPhones in everyone's pockets today are all RISC-based, as are current generation Apple laptops and desktop computers (all except the Mac Pro).
@@BruceHoult e x a c t l y !!!
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Amazing, we are finally moving forward to get open computing hardware too.
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You are totally nice with your hardware... My encouragement usually is flavored with colorful metaphors. :P
Another very well put-together video that I am sure meant a lot to tech-savvy developers and tinkerers, but which to me was just an interesting way to learn that this is not for me.
Never mind, it's always worth my while watching your videos even though I have too little tech-know-how to understand quite why this is not better than, say, a Raspberry Pi 4 for me.
Just a few more great videos like this one and I will be on my way to choosing a simple but reliable backup for my old laptop which runs Linux Mint 20.
Thanks a lot.
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In my world, AWOL is Absent WithOut Leave.
Skimped a bit on the USB I feel.
Another SCB with a full size HDMI. Come on Pi Foundation, keep up!
Another easy listen from CB.
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My Sunday morning routine, watch EC, coffee & toast. In that order.
Nice to see something completely new in the world of SBC’s. Time for my second cup and to watch the video one more time. 👍🏼
Do you get extra toast too?
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Questions!
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I'm very interested in RISC V - really glad you cover SBC development on your channel.
I reckon it will be particularly the Chinese manufacturers that invest into R&D of this technology to build up an alternative to x86 and Arm architecture to become independent of potential embargoes. Therefore I have mixed feelings about it.
That aside they are still costly even to recent Raspberry Pi 4 market prices.😅
Oof that's expensive.
This is certainly just the beginning, The Pi sells in the tens of millions each year so obviously it has economies of scale. IMO a RISC V board will need an Octacore processor and 4GB RAM minimum for it to go mainstream, and they're 1 to 2 years away from that yet. Of course the Raspberry Pi foundation may take a dip into RISC V themselves.
Still open computing will benefit everyone, as it won't allow any one nation to use access to technology as a political weapon.
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I'm very interested to see where the future of RISC-V leads. Thanks for the excellent video!
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Is that an LXDE desktop? Wow... that's been a while. Thanks for covering this new hardware.
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I love your channel sir!
I was disappointed that I didn't see a video from EC at 9AM. It turns out the channel got accidentally unsubscibed in a purge of channels I susbscribe to with no videos in a year. I corrected that quickly after a search.
I'm glad to see that there is starting to be some standardisation of board size. It would be nifty if there ws more standardisation of port locations. It would increase the peripheral options for all boards.
Nice intro to this SBC. Thanks !
Another interesting SBC video from Chris @ E.C. my Sunday is now complete I look forward to the next video. I'm intrigued about the development of RISC-V and where this will lead us in the future, I thought it was a shame that the Debian supplied couldn't output to HDMI, hopefully they'll rectify that. The USB-C OTG socket is an interesting one that I've read about that allows USB devices, tablets or smartphones, to act as a host, allowing other USB devices such as USB flash drives, digital cameras, mouse or keyboards, to be attached to them, the standard was developed in 2001 back in the dim and distant past!! :)
I suspect it's because HDMI isn't open source.
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And on the way to the great adventure of open standard instruction set architecture !
Yes, the journey there is speeding up. :)
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Thanks for sharing your experience with all of us 👍😀
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Wow one more risc v computer. Thanks for review!
I might grab one of these boards out of curiosity, however will definitely try to run GNU/Linux Debian as server (without GUI), this little board could be interesting for some little home automation :$
Have a great week ahead and keep it up the great job
@tripplefives Sounds like a good plan.
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I look forward to the continuation of this series. So far it seems like a step down from where other architecture is, but I'm sure there's a reason you are excited about it.
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The pine64 team is also Gearing up for risc and I’m excited for that
Yes, very much so. It will be good to see a Pine64 RISC-V board.
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Good morning from Florida.
Greetings from the UK. :)
Very interesting Chris. Is that multiple microphone connector a standard pinout?
Greetings Chris. I don't think it's a standard pinout -- it's for a six microphone array (the kind of thing you find in a smart speaker), and I don't think there are standards for those yet, but I may be wrong.
Thanks a lot Chris (Where is Jeff?), haaaaa, I am so jealous... I want to do some Risc V things this year, pretty sure this is THE year, and waiting your next video. Thanks again.
This is indeed the year for RISC-V stuff. There are going to be second-generation RISC-V SBCs later in 2022 with a lot more power for a lot less money.
Love the RISC-V content keep it up!
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It would be cool if you tried to recompile the kernel with some customizations on the board itself.
And here we meet again
Greetings!
Greetings on another Sunday! :)
I find your videos interesting and informative. The RISC-V seems a technology with a future. The only computer I have is an Asus Chromebook but would like a Raspberry Pi 400 and a Windows computer.
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What a teaser, it was cool.
Another Sunday up in here! Only this time, I got a little question; Is it possible to run, say, a version of Windows on a RISC-V board?
I've just found this comment -- highlighted as you are a channel member! :) And the answer is, not yet. But I'm sure they will at some point be a RISC-V version of Windows, just as there is now an ARM version.
Back in the early 90's, my older sister worked on a Cray super computer based on RISC architecture for simulation purposes. It was already 64 bits and cooled with liquid nitrogen... The casing was matte black with blood red writtings. Gorgeous monoliths. 😅 That was the first time I heard about RISC architecture.
Except specific applications like the DEC Alpha, I didn't heard much about RISC's plateforms... Can't wait to hear more about.
ARM uses RISC architecture, so they are super common, for example in your phone
@@mikolajwojnicki2169 yeah, and all micro processors are RISC, e.g. in watches, toasters, microwaves, ovens, cars, trains, speakers, ...
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I really appreciate the effort (especially the "Chapters") that you've spent for your videos.
I guess it's time to get one! Thank you for sharing!
He’s risking it all on SBC!
I wonder if RISC-V versikn of Haiku OS can run on this hardware.
Although RISC-V is in its early stages of development, soon it will take over the lead and leave the ARM ISC far behind to become the be-all and end-all ISC solution out there. RISC-V is the future, ARM is not. I'm slightly sceptical about the development of the proprietary extensions because of the license conditions of this CPU architecture. It may be possible for the manufacturers to create custom extensions that they'd like to keep private and prefer not to contribute their versions back to the Open Source community. It has happened in history if we look back and see how the ARM ISC that we see today has evolved. Nevertheless, if big players like Texas Instruments and NVIDIA (with an open mind) come to develop RISC-V, we might see the next generation of computing very soon. But the corporations I mentioned have never been very friendly towards the Open Source community. NVDIA's hostility to the free software movement is an unforgettable historical chapter in the world of computers. I'll add one more thing to assure you, the analogue-digital hybrid types of Logic Processing Units are on the way which will declare the D-Day to today's practical general-purpose computers. They will have an analogue Matrix Multiplier Unit, an analogue Differential Equation Solver Unit, a different kind of analogue Adder and so on. They won't consume that much energy as compared to today's hard-to-afford ultra-high-end GPUs. Training the AI models from a data set will be a thing done in the blink of an eye. Today's digital-only type computers will be a thing of the past. Since RISC-V is an open architecture, only it can help us to get there by stripping down the R&D expenditure. 👍👍
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as there are multiple RISC-V boards showing up, that are rather well decked out in capability, it would be interesting to see them compared side by side and bench-marked
and what does it take to get setup to do RISC-V in a cross-development manner from a luxuriant desktop computer (preferably Linux)?
even if these boards can run a graphical Linux desktop, well 1GHz CPU and 1GB or memory is not at all a viable development platform for the IDE tool suites that I'm accustomed to using in the day job - a tutorial on doing such RISC-V cross-development would be a welcome topic to be covered
thanks for covering RISC-V
i guess the way to go is: develop and compile on a reasonably powerfull desktop PC, then take whatever you compiled over to the real riscV hardware and see if it works
It just works, all crosscompile tools are available on most main Linux Distribtions. You can even run RISC-V debian or ubuntu on Qemu on a x86 system to test it, but cross compile will be faster than compiling on qemu ^^. Sadly this demo shown only the browser, all web browser are really slow on the D1, don't know why for, most other applications just run fine. The video decoding was not mainlined 1 month ago, but it should be done now, it use the same video decoder than on other Allwinner chips, so not so hard to have it working :).
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Thank you, Mr. Barnatt!
Thanks for another interesting video.
Would be very interesting to see review of some kiosk os on PCBs
According to the 4 orange Chinese Character (全志在綫) on the box, I think AWOL means AllWinner Online
Thanks. :)
Don't know where else to ask this (it's about the Raspberry Pi). I see that Raspberry Pi OS Buster has just been updated to use Wayland - I wonder what kind of video playback you would get now? Hopefully a decrease in dropped frames.
Yes, there is now experimental Wayland support in Bullseye (not Buster) for those wishing to experiment! How this works with GPU accelerated video playback in a browser I've no idea -- but I would imagine for now that the best playback is obtained in the standard version of Bullseye -- which certainly improved on that in Buster (and Legacy, as Buster has become). Interesting times!
A few questions. First specific to the chip. You talked about the DSP inside it. Is that open source too?
More specifie to open source ISAs generally, what specifically is the benefit to me generally? I don't pay licensing fees to any ISAs directly, I just receive it in the cost of my chip or board. What amount am I paying for that license? Is it a significant part of my cost? If it isn't, should I really care? What other value to me is it giving me?
The PCB silkscreen seems to have been done at a weird 25-30° angle. See 4:26. I wonder why. It's OK for a prototype but I've seen better on cheap $5 PCBs.
Not related to this video...
But is there a review on the orange pi 3LTS....
It has been released for over 4 months.
Thanks
I've yet to decide on reviewing the Orange Pi 4TLS, as it is very similar to the Organge Pi 4 (it is basically the same board, minus the onboard eMMC, and with the option of 3GB of RAM as well as 4GB (the same as the Orange Pi 4).
@@ExplainingComputers thanks .
I do love your contents....
Always on point....👍
Nice my favorite day Have a nice week and will watch it while I eat my breakfast
Greetings!
I managed to make everything work on mine. It took me 8 hours to install the proper image with their horrible burning software and 4 hours of configuring everything on it : proper path for apt, setting locales, creating proper account, installing mosh, installing gdb, git, emacs... Now it works perfectly with my iPad BLINK and from the television. If you need help, you can ask me in this comment, I will try to help you.
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Great video Chris 🙂
Please make more videos about RISC-V or RISC-V SBC, I love RISC-V and how open source they are which is mind blowing.
My next RISC-V video will post in May. :)
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Could you explain why an open ISA is important and what the significance is to end-users?
I notice on the other side of this board, it said FLASH, and there was a chip in that spot. So is there on board flash storage?
Jeez Louise... How do you get your hands on such nice toys? I was trying to get the Berkely out of order machine RISC-V core running on my FPGA dev board.
I was also trying to get my own basic integer machine together, but... After hours of work on a decoder stage.... I kinda got a bit discouraged....
I purchased this board from Ali Express: www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002856721588.html
@@ExplainingComputers it's really fantastic that you bust out your personal wallet for these reviews. It really is quite appreciated. Oh, and thanks for the link!