The PineTab-V is a RISC-V tablet, or rather a tablet development kit, based on StarFive JH7110 quad-core RISC-V SoC, and with the same design as the upcoming Arm-based PineTab2 tablet that’s scheduled to launch on April 11.
Pine64 just launched the Star64 single board computer to help with software development on Linux-capable RISC-V hardware, and they took the opportunity to lay out a tablet board based on the same JH7110 to replace the Rockchip RK3566 board found in the PineTab2, so eventually, a working sample should look like that…
PineTab-V preliminary specifications:
- SoC – StarFive JH7110 with
- CPU – Quad-core 64-bit RISC-V (SiFive U74 – RV64GC) processor @ up to 1.5 GHz
- GPU – Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU @ up to 600 MHz supporting OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 1.2, Vulkan 1.2
- VPU
- 4Kp60 H.265/H.264 video decoder
- 1080p30 H.265 video encoder
- System & Storage
- Option 1 – 4GB LPDDR4, 64GB eMMC flash module
- Option 2 – 8GB LPDDR4, 128GB eMMC flash module
- MicroSD card slot
- Display – 10.1-inch IPS display with 1280×800 resolution
- Video Output – Micro HDMI port up to 4K @ 30 Hz
- Audio – Speakers and Microphone, 3.5mm audio jack
- Cameras – 5MP rear camera, 2MP front-facing camera/webcam
- Connectivity – WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 via Fn-Link 6252B-UUB module
- USB – 1x USB 3.0 Type-C port, 1x USB 2.0 Type-C port also used for charging
- Expansion – PCIe 2.0 x1 exposed on board, but reserved to hardware “hackers”
- Misc – Volume rocker and Home button, optional magnetically attached keyboard with backlight
- Battery – 6,000mAh battery (22.2Wh)
- Power Supply – 5V via USB port
- Dimensions – 242 x 161 x 9mm (Black chassis for the RISC-V model, instead of silver gray for the Arm tablet)
The specifications above are preliminary because there’s no wiki, and the announcement has limited information. But I did receive some photos of the board and wrote likely specifications from the PineTab2 and Star64 specifications.
This is what it looks like once the board is installed in the PineTab2 hardware…
We are not shown any software because that thing is currently a brick… But eventually, the PineTab-V should run Debian and other Linux distributions, or why not, even Android if that’s your thing. Pine64 is probably half joking when they say the top photo in this post is of the PineTab-V in 2025…
As mentioned above, the Pinetab2 will launch on April 11 for $159 and up [Update: moved to April 13], and run DanctNix Arch Linux with KDE Plasma Desktop, and the PineTab-V will also launch on April 11 with the same price and run… nothing. It will be a bit like the PinePhone “BraveHeart Edition” where you had to install the OS yourself, except I’d except software support to be even further away since I don’t think there’s an OS image that boots with a working display yet, so you may have to roll your own own. It should probably be called the PineTab-V “Lost Souls” edition or “Fools” edition :), and it will definitely be for developers only and end users should stay away from it until software support improves.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Forgive me if I’m talking rubbish (as usual), but… It sounds like it’s only the CPU that’s switched out for a RISC-V JH7110, so won’t the screen and keyboard (etc) be the same drivers as for the ARM PineTab?
I hear there’s been quite a bit of developer hours and quite a lot of progress getting the VisionFive 2 to boot… I guess, since that uses the same chip as the Star64 and the PineTab V, all that work will be used here?
> it’s only the CPU that’s switched out
It’s the SoC that consists of more than just CPU cores. All those IP blocks for display usually differ (or are different variants of the usual Synopsys Designware blocks SoC vendors license).
StarFive’s 5.15 branch is in good shape and all the work done on other JH7110 boards will benefit Star64 and this board here (which most probably shares almost all HW details to be as compatible to Star64 as possible).
@tkaiser 🙂 thank you for setting me straight.
It would involve some copy and paste from both the Star64 and existing PineTab 2.
Physical interfaces aside, I imagine it isn’t as simple as just copying the Star64 – e.g. the original PinePhone had to do various Allwinner-specific tweaks to get it running properly on a battery to access various low power modes suitable for answering voice calls when the device was snoozing (which then are different on the Pro version using Rockchip.)
I think the main difference to PineTab 2 is asides the different SoC a different PMIC (not Rockchip but X-Powers/Allwinner AXP15060 – this is at least the PMIC on Star64 and not so surprisingly also on VisionFive 2). And difference to Star64 is accessing the main display (MIPI-DSI?).
Unlike a phone it doesn’t need to support sophisticated low power modes or does it?
As an example: @Icenowy worked on an early Star64 dev sample in August 2022, tweaked kernel support and tuned DVFS (‘overclocking’ to 1750 MHz) but initially used the Debian image released for StarFive VisionFive V2 to boot Star64.
That’s why when clicking on the Star64 entry in my sbc-bench results list the details will list this other JH7110 device.
Various people on the VisionFive2 forum are trying to make JH7110 to boot directly from NVME and output 4K over HDMI. I hope that in the 10 years RiscV will be a high quality alternative to ARM/RPi.
Seriously any riscv manufacturer needs a haiku developer on their payroll. The Haiku OS riscv port is almost complete and could be working on this computer in a few days.
“Display – 10.1-inch IPS display with 1280×800 resolution”
That puts me off. HW is capable of handling 4K!
For a second iteration, I would expect full hd even for $100 more.
Too bad. I really love the idea.
So FullHD max, but only at 30 FPS. Meh.