chip Photo:VCG

The world's first RISC-V single board PC Beagle-V based on Linux operation system was debuted by Shanghai tech firm StarFive on Wednesday. The computer was co-developed by StarFive, Shenzhen Seeed Studio and US SBC (single board computer) company Beagleboard, paper.com reported. 

Beagle-V uses the domestic made SoC (system-on-a-chip) artificial intelligence vision processing chip by StarFive and can be used in areas of mechanical engineering, data center, artificial intelligence and cloud computing, said the report. 

RISC stands for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, which is a computer with a small, highly optimized set of instructions and with highly-improved operational efficiency. RISC-V is the fifth generation of the RISC. 

Founder and CEO of StarFive Xu Taojin said that Beagle-V will meet industry requirements of demo board with high-performance, multifunction and low-cost. "Beagle-V has a small size of 85 millimeters multiple 70 milimeters and feature of energy saving, which is an ideal solution for single board computer," said Xu.

Geng Bo, deputy secretary-general of the China Solid State Lighting Alliance, told Global Times that RISC-V and ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) are two representative types of Reduced Instruction Set Computer invented in 1980s with most differences between two processors the design style and open source degree. 

"Because ARM is not open source, the users of ARM have to adjust frequency and power dissipation of the products follow the original design of the ARM processor and to pay expensive license fee," said Geng.

Geng referred to the open source and zero license fees of RISC-V attracting more developers. "It's said that ARM had canceled license fees for the companies with financing amount lower than $5 million, to compete with its opponent RISC-V on the aspects of pricing," said Geng.

During the ceremony, officers of Shanghai government said the government will support the development of high technologies including RISC.

Beagle-V will start selling in March 2020 and will be opened to the broader market in the second half of 2021.