BeagleV-Ahead board announced

RISC-V Ecosystem
1

The Soc used is a Alibaba T-Head TH1520 (2 GHz quad-core RISC-V 64GCV Xuantie C910 CPU ). And (after VAT) has a higher price point than you would expect. Same SoC as used in the Lichee Pi 4A.

Unfortunately the C910 used in the SoC is the pre-ratification RISC-V Vector Extension 0.7.1 which is assembly language and binary incompatible with the ratified RISC-V Vector Extension 1.0 (2021-11). Unless there is a newer hardware revision of the chip with the exact same part number, that supports RISC-V Vector Extension 1.0, which would be extremely strange from a marketing perspective.

For more info see: https://beaglev-ahead.org/

Board Features

  • T-Head TH1520 AI system-on-chip processor
    • Quad-core XuanTie C910 open-source RTL RISC-V (RV64GCV ISA) CPU @ 2GHz
      • 3 issue, 8 instruction, 9-12 stage pipeline
      • In-order fetch, out-of-order launch, out-of-order completion and in-order retirement
      • 64KB I-cache, 64KB D-cache per core
    • AI NPU (Neural Processing Unit) with 4TOPS INT8 @ 1GHz
      • Support for TensorFlow, ONNX, Caffe
      • Feature extraction accelerator
    • H.265/H.264 @ 4Kp75 video decoder
    • H.265/H.264 @ 4Kp40 video encoder
    • JPEG encoder and decoder
    • 2x ISP (Image Signal Processor)
    • 2x DSP (Digital Signal Processor)
    • 2D accelerator
    • 3D Vulkan/OpenCL/OpenGLES accelerator (Imagination BXM-4-64)
      • 50GFLOPS, 3Mpixel/s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
    • C906-based (RV64IMA[FD]C[V] ISA) audio processor subsystem
  • 4GB LPDDR4
  • 16GB soldered onboard eMMC flash
  • MicroSD card cage
  • BeagleBone-style form-factor
  • USB3 type-C super-speed (5Gbps) micro-AB dual-role for power and data.
    • power input (no power output).
  • 1x Gigabit Ethernet (RTL8211F PHY) with speed/connection indicators
  • Integrated SDIO 2.4GHz and 5GHz WiFi (AMPAK AP6203BM - Broadcom chipset)
  • micro-HDMI type-A connector
  • 2xCSI ribbon cable connectors
  • 1xDSI ribbon cable connector
  • Expansion via 16pin mikroBUS shuttle connector for interfacing mikroE click boards (BeagleBone cape headers)
  • 2x46-pin expansion headers with 4-pin HS-USB extension
  • 2x8-pin “mikroBus shuttle” ribbon-cable connector for audio and sensors
  • 3-pin TTL-level debug UART connector
  • Fan power connector (fan is optional)
  • 6x LEDs (1 power, 5 programmable)
  • 3x push-buttons (power, reset, boot/user)
  • 5V barrel jack

EDIT: I should probably add that the “TH1520” SoC, as far as I am aware, is only supported currently by longterm release kernel 5.10.113.

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