There was lots of excitement when BeagleV Starlight single board computer was announced in January of this year. With a price tag of $119 and up, it promises to be an affordable RISC-V SBC with StarFive JH7100 dual-core SiFive U74 Vision SoC with AI accelerator, H.265/H.264 hardware video decoding, up to 8GB RAM, HDMI output, Gigabit Ethernet, and so on.
Several beta testers even received BeagleV Startlight prototypes, providing instructions for buildroot, boot Linux, or even a video review with Fedora. The first version lacked a GPU, and the initial schedule planned for a new revision with an Imagination GPU to be manufactured in September.
Drew Fustini made the announcement on Beagleboard.org forums:
BeagleV™ is a developing community from BeagleBoard.org Foundation. BeagleV community goal is to support Open Source Hardware boards with the possibilities of the open RISC-V instruction set. This site is where software and hardware developers can communicate about what’s happening at the intersection of Open Source Hardware and RISC-V. We plan to present the BeagleV™ community with sample reference boards to test and suggest changes. Our recent beta development program with the BeagleV™-Starlight prototype is one example.
The prototypes presented to the BeagleV™ community may have the possibility to go to production or they may just be used by the community for education and as targets to further RISC-V software developments. The BeagleV™-Starlight prototype will not be going into mass production, but we are continuing to work on board designs with other RISC-V SoCs. BeagleBoard.org® and Seeed Studio hope to have a new BeagleV™ community board available early Q1.
The Wiki on Seeed Studio now returns a 404 page, and the official BeagleV website mostly points to the announcement above.
There’s no exact explanation as to why it was decided not to mass-produce this particular version of the board. It could be supply issues combined with the GPU implementation possibly taking more time. Another reason could be JH7110 processor itself not going into production, but we just don’t know. [Update: Starfive now plans to launch a JH7100 SBC in Q3 2021 designed and manufactured in collaboration with Radxa, see pinned comment for announcement]
Via Reddit
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It’s now official. Starfive will collaborate with Radxa to make a new JH7100 SBC expected for Q3 2021, followed by a board with JH7110 SoC with GPU. At Starfive Technology, we have been committed to promoting the development of the global RISC-V open source software and hardware ecosystem since we were founded. Although the BeagleV-StarLight joint development board is no longer in mass production, we completely respect our partner’s decision and appreciate the contribution of all developers in the Beagle Board community. We look forward to collaborating again in the near future, and will continue to uphold our attitude in… Read more »
That should be the board layout for Radxa JH7100 SBC.
People are still committing patchsets for StarFive JH7100 SoC to the Linux kernel mailing list: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/7/28/847
Three hundred, I believe. I’m one of them.
Everybody gangsta until they don’t have a GPU.
JH7100 and JH7110 will continue. I cannot believe a chip company will discontinue their product when they are just beginning.
@Tom, you are the man 😉
That is too bad. I was waiting for this board.
What a bummer, just days after I had an eureka moment, I finally know what to make with this board.
Needing to get a working GPU is the obvious answer, but do you suppose it’s possible they ran into an unexpected component supply or licensing issue? NVDLA framework license supposedly has it open source and no commercial use restriction, right? (I’ve read it.) But Nvidia has so many layers of licensing I feel like it’d be easy to find out later there’s limitation somewhere in there. Having just installed Cuda, Cudnn, Tensorflow etc on my linux machine …. I was surprised how many different Nvidia components went into it, each with their own “i agree” box. That’s just one component/software… Read more »
Odds are good that the SoC isn’t going into mass production with a new one being cut right now that’s a major improvement- which would justify this sort of thing.
I have doubts that we will get a cheap RISC-V SBCs this year. There are also no news from PicoRio.
There should be a Pico-ITX board based on JH7100 SoC this year. Not sure when exactly.