ASUS Unveils The Tinker V As Their First RISC-V Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ASUS Unveils The Tinker V As Their First RISC-V Board

For over a half-decade ASUS has been selling the Thinker Board devices as their line of Raspberry Pi alternatives. To date the ASUS Tinker Board single board computers have all been Arm-based while now they have launched their first RISC-V board, the Tinker V...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/ASUS-Tinker-V

[CochainComplex]

Great - now hopefully a good price

[igxqrrl]

Official OS support is fantastic. I've tried a couple of the other RISC-V SBCs, and you always have to download some kernel patch posted by an anonymous user on a mysterious forum to get them to work. The first time I tried it was an all day endeavor.

To really spur RISC-V adoption the space needs an SBC with official OS support. Just flash an image and go, like people are accustomed to with the Raspberry Pi. For true tinkering, I don't think performance is that important. My Raspberry Pis are significantly slower than a NUC or Mac Mini, but I still use them because they're cheap, small, and fun.

The Tinker-V isn't quite what I wish it was. No out-of-the-box HDMI or USB, so clearly not oriented toward this market. But so close.

[ezst036]

I hope this eventually leads toward standard RISC-V mATX, ITX, and eventually ATX boards with a Coreboot/etc OSS bios from the factory.

[Old Grouch]

It could be an interesting target for OpenWrt - with two GigE ports, one faces the WAN, and the other a local switch. Given the cpu specifications, I doubt it could route a full GigE of traffic, but it would be nice to get more RISC-V options for OpenWrt.

The specifications say it has 1 x microUSB and 1 x microUSB OTG.

For OpenWrt use, the CAN Bus is superfluous, not so sure about the RS232

[microcode]

Out of the box support makes a huge difference!

[caligula]

I've tried a couple of the other RISC-V SBCs, and you always have to download some kernel patch posted by an anonymous user on a mysterious forum to get them to work. The first time I tried it was an all day endeavor.

This is the biggest benefit when using RPi. Closed source ThreadX firmware for VideoCore and closed supply chains, combined with strong focus on marketing, helps them focus on delivering max value to customers.

[stormcrow]

Slow, but immune to Spectre & any side channel attacks that require multi-core race conditions as it's single core & in-order execution. That doesn't mean it's immune to all hardware exploitation, only that this particular CPU doesn't suffer from the problems that plague modern x86 & ARM processors out of the gate. It also has built in level 1/2 ECC RAM protection which makes it a step up from most Intel and ARM boards in the same space.

[kiffmet]

caligula and yet RPi still doesn't have VAAPI and relies on a custom kernel to get the most out of it. I've had a better experience with Rockchip SBCs tbh.
stormcrow the part about side channel attacks also applies to A53 and A55 cores, since those are in-order aswell.

What's disappointing about RISCV for me is that the CPU performance just isn't there yet. The AndesCore AX45MP in the Asus tinkerboard is clock for clock slower than a Cortex A15 from 2012. On the other hand, it's likely that ARM SBCs will start shipping A77 cores this year and IMO, with that CPU and following generations, things are starting to get really interesting…
That many extensions of the RISC-V ISA are still drafts isn't particularily nice either, since compatibility may break in the future.

[ayumu]

Official OS support is fantastic. I've tried a couple of the other RISC-V SBCs, and you always have to download some kernel patch posted by an anonymous user on a mysterious forum to get them to work. The first time I tried it was an all day endeavor.

VisionFive 2 is getting close to that. StarFive, the company behind both the SoC and the board is itself working on upstreaming support.

https://rvspace.org/en/project/JH7110_Upstream_Plan