VisionFive 2: RISC-V Quad Core Low Cost SBC

foreign [Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time we're going to take a look at this the eagerly awaited Vision 5 2 single ball computer from Star 5. this has got a quad core risk 5 system on a chip not an arm or an x86 system on a chip and the board comes in between models with two four or eight gigabytes of RAM and they sell for 55 65 and 85 respectively and what all this means is that the vision 5 2 is the first low-cost high performance risk 5 SBC that could be a true competitor to O Raspberry Pi so let's go and take a closer look so here we have our vision 5 2 and specifically a four gigabyte model which I bought as a super early bird backer for 68 Singapore dollars which is about 51 US dollars and even including shipping this was delivered to me here in the UK for 51 pounds 43 which is a 6162 US dollars so there is no doubt in terms of cost this is definitely a Raspberry Pi competitor so let's open it up let's bring in uh Stanley the knife and just to slice through if I can so with this uh stuff I can never get into things can I go on there we are got the thing off like that oh it's lovely soft touch cardboard matte laminate and things there we are I'll get in eventually you know I will and get inside there we are oh it's getting exciting now here we have our new single board computer little bag is it sealed no it isn't and uh slightly cold though there we are here is the vision five two now the critical thing about this board is that it's got a wrist five system on a chip and in case you don't know risk 5 is a free and open instruction set architecture or Isa that provides an alternative to the closed Source isas used in today's x86 and arm CPUs and if you want to know more about what this means watch my explaining risk 5 video and look out for my risk 5 2023 update now just before we dig into the specifications of this board I think it's worth comparing it to what I've got over here which is a vision five one launched in January 2022. and if we put the vision 5 2 down next to the vision five one it doesn't want to sit flat why is that we will find out fairly shortly but before we do there's two important things I want to say about these two boards and the first one is the division five one is based on Star 5's j87100 system on a chip with two one gigahertz u74 cores and no GPU meanwhile The Vision 5 2 is based on a j8 710 with four 1.5 gigahertz u74 cores and an imagination GPU secondly The Vision 5 1 which came with eight gigabytes of RAM cost 179 dollars whilst The Vision 5 2 coming with either two four or eight gigabytes of RAM cross as I said already 55 65 or 85 dollars so in only a year Star 5 have delivered a far more powerful board for a far lower price and this has to be very good news indeed for the development of risk 5. foreign as we can see the vision 5 2 adopts the increasingly common Pico ITX form factor which means that the board is a hundred by 72 millimeters with most of the major and user connectivity on one Edge at the heart of the board is Star 5 j8 710 system on a chip with its four sci-fi 1.5 gigahertz u74 64-bit cores that support the rv64 GC Isa these are coupled with an imagination bxe432 MC1 GPU which by default is clocked at 400 megahertz although it can run at up to 600 megahertz to get a feel of how this chip weighs up against an arm SOC side 5 compare their risk 5 u74 cores to arm cortex a53 and a55 given that a Raspberry Pi 3B plus has four 1.4 gigahertz a53 cores it's therefore reasonable to state that in terms of processing power The Vision 5 2 sits somewhere between a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Raspberry Pi 4. turning to the main lung edge of the vision 5 2 we find a 3.5 millimeter audio jack two type a USB 3 ports and two type a USB 2 ports even if all four of these ports are color-coded blue to try and confuse us we also get a full size HDMI 2.0 connector supporting up to 4K at 30 frames a second and two RJ45 sockets on most version 5.2 models these both provide one gigabit Ethernet although on this super early bird Hardware one of the ports is limited to 100 megabits turning to the first short Edge we find a two pin fan header together with a nippy CSI or camera serial interface connector for hooking up a camera spinning 90 we then find a USBC connector for supplying the board with 5 volt power as well as indicator LEDs a reset switch and a 40 pin gpio header and you'll be pleased to hear that python support for this connector is already available as I'll demonstrate towards the end of this video but before that let's rotate to our second short Edge where we discover two mipi DSI or display stereo interface connectors that support 1080p LCD panels looking back at the top of the board we can see our Ram which here is four gigabyte although sadly I have to report we've got no onboard Wi-Fi or Bluetooth so for wireless a USB dongle is required it's also worth noting that Nestle behind the gpio header are these two dip switches which allow us to select booting from the SBI Flash and microSD card emmc or uart and talking of which if we turn the board over like this we discover three storage options for start we've got a Micro SD card slot here and then down here we've got the connectors for an emmc flash module and then the thing that stops the board resting flat on the surface is this a very welcome m.2 connector which supports an nvme SSD which mounts neatly onto the board just the way it should and so there we are the vision five two a reasonably priced SBC with a great specification that will allow a lot more makers enthusiasts and developers to start experimenting with risk 5. greetings I've now got everything connected up I've added a small heatsink as you can see and in the micro SD slot I've got a card containing debut so let's turn on the power here we go and we have an illuminated red LED and fairly soon we'll have a flashing green LED there we are we've got that as well and what we're booting up is an engineering release of Debian as the final version is not yet available and this is because these are very early days both for the vision five two as well as for desktop risk 5 Computing more broadly anyway let's log in using a root and a star five like that and as the system sorts itself out I'll let you know that today I had a very helpful email conversation with my contacts at star5 and what they've told me about software development is that at present we could only provide an engineering release of Debian desktop display capability needs to be optimized we are working with imagination that's the company that makes the GPU to solve the problem of GPU support because many problems have never been encountered before the software team cannot give the time for the release version of Debian we will continue to optimize and update the version we are working with the community to complete Ubuntu and other distros the time of completion cannot be estimated in my opinion it will take several months to mature the vision 5.2 software ecosystem which requires the joint efforts of the RIS 5 community so with all that explained here we are on the Debian desktop and it does work so for example if we go up to the menu we can see there's quite a lot of software installed here some of this was here with the image so many stuff I installed myself but it's a pretty comprehensive Suite of things available on this risk 5 system let's start off by running up LibreOffice writer which I think is very exciting because this is the first time I've seen LibreOffice running on this five Hardware so we'll give it a second I'll let it run through in real time we're almost there almost running LibreOffice writer it's very exciting indeed come on you can do it it's done it here we are in LibreOffice writer and we'll do my normal thing of typing hello like that and selecting it and we'll try and make it very large indeed there we go let's go down to 96. yes we've got very large text here in the brofist writer on a risk 5 system but we won't get too excited we'll come out of this move on to something else let's exit Libra office and I'm sure it'll say do we want to save our changes no we don't there we go and let's have a look at something else let's run up for example under Graphics I've installed the gnu image manipulation program that's installed without any issues I do like the mushrooms we see when the runs up and uh almost there there we are can we have some side panels please there we are side panels as well and if we just do a new document like that hopefully this will work and it seems to come on give us a whole thing it has and then honor of star five we've got some Stars here we'll paint a few stars in order of star five making division five two but again we'd only get too excited so we'll come out of this as well we'll quit from and again not save things there we are and now I want to run up a terminal which I'll do like that and I've been trying to get the text in the terminal to be larger so you can see it clearer on the screen in video and I've failed to do that doesn't matter what I do I can't scale up the text in the terminal so instead in post-production I'm going to do this so we can see the terminal clearly and now we'll run up a h top like this because I'm sure some of you want to see each top which is running fine there we can see we've got our four cores not very busy at the moment but everything is running okay so I've shown you that that's now come out of that F10 there we are and I thought we'd execute an LS BLK list block devices on the system where at the moment all we can see is the micro SD card from which we're running the system and I have tried plugging in an m.2 nvme SSD but it isn't detected but I have installed HD parameters anyway so I thought we'd test the speed of the micro SD card and somewhere in here I've got the right command there it is that's just to run that see what speed we get well I know what speed we get I've done this test before but I'll run it for you and find excitement what's happening there we are 21.15 megabytes a second and we're running here from a standisk extreme Pro micro SD card which can obtain speeds of towards about 100 megabytes a second so clearly there's something going on here with the interface to the micro SD card and what I'm also going to do is to plug in an external SSD like this there we go if I once again do an LS BLK list block devices we can see it's appeared there and we'll test the speed of that which is of course a surrogate test of the speed of the USB 3 interface here which is giving us what 240 megabytes a second again very slow and a half the speed I can get from that particular connected drive so again there's something going on in this engineering release of Debian with the speed of storage interfaces anyway let's come out of the terminal like that because the final thing we haven't looked at I'm sure some of you want to see is a browser pretty important in the modern desktop operating system so down under internet we have a development version of Firefox This is highly unstable so I've left it till last hopefully it'll run up cross your fingers go on be nice for us Firefox show us what you can do in Risk five and uh it's working look I think it's going to be okay it's going to take us to the explaining computer's website and with that I think I'll bring this demo to a close foreign guess what it's me back again and I've now wired two LEDs with current limiting resistors to some Jeep I opens here on division five two and I've done this so I can do a little test because over here in Debian I've installed python I've installed Sony and I've also installed Vision 5 gpio which as you can probably guess is a library for controlling the GPI opens on the vision 5.2 in Python and as you can see I've written some very basic code just to test out the principle so if we bring back the shot of the LEDs and if we now run the code like this there we are it works we've got a couple of flashing LEDs and I'm sure some people are thinking he's just got a couple of flashing LEDs what's the point in that but I'm sure other people are thinking ah this means we have got control of gpio with this gpio connector on the vision 5.2 in Python and that I think is very exciting because it means we're already in a position to start doing risk 5 SBC maker projects here on division five two foreign 2 is an important SPC that will provide wider access to risk 5 Hardware capable of running a Linux distro now I'm sure there are people in the comments going Chris it's just like some of the arm boards you review on the channel great Hardware hasn't got the software support however I don't think that type of criticism is valid in this particular case and that's for two reasons firstly end user Linux Distributing is very new it's only been possible at all for a few years the hardware has been very expensive it got less expensive in 2022 with the launch of boards like the first Vision 5 but it's only now with a launch of the vision five two and a couple of other boards and they were coming out in 2023 that we're going to get more and more people having access to what is in the broadest sense a development board this is a development board for the whole risk 5 end user Computing ecosystem and we should expect that boards like this will have to be in the hands of Developers for some time before we get the same level of support for desktop with five Computing that we currently enjoy for x86 and arm and it's also worth remembering I bought super early bird Hardware this was shipped to me and the other super early bird backers a few months ahead of when most people will get their boards so when most people get their hands on a vision five two the sofa will advance because time will have passed it's also worth remembering that star five the company who made this board are not like the manufacturers of most arm sbcs because they don't just make the vision five two they also make its system on a chip the jh7 110 and therefore they've got a massive incentive to develop software to support their chip in the marketplace we know that already there's going to be at least one more SBC launched in 2023 using the jh710 the star 64 from pine64 and so development for this board has got knock-on implications more broadly for other boards on the ecosystem and that will pull in developers developers like a new frontier and wrist five is a new frontier and working to develop for this board is part of that and that will catalyze development and make things happen but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 158,920

Keywords: RISC-V, RISCV, RISC V, VisionFive, VisionFive 2, Vision Five 2, StarFive, Star Five, U74, quad core U74, RISC-V U74, RISC-V SBC, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, JH7110, Raspberry Pi RISC-V, Raspberry Pi alternative, Raspberry Pi competitor, RISC-V Debian, Debian, LibreOffice, RISC-V LibreOffice, LibreOffice RISC-V, GIMP RISC-V, VisionFive GPIO, VisionFive2 GPIO, RISC-V GPIO, GPIO

Id: ykKnc86UtXg

Length: 18min 57sec (1137 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/PrimaCora]

No official store to buy from. A kick starter page for pre ordering. Backers get a discount with the lowest being $45 and highest $66. For the non backers it's $55 - $85 respectively.

The theoretical prices aren't bad. However it seems people are pre-scalping and listing on Amazon for $100+

Hopefully this brings another board to market and doesn't turn into a ghost.

[u/recursive_incursion]

Anyone know if there are any networking benchmarks, especially for routing between the two network interfaces?

It seems like an idea solution for a firewall, but I don't want to jump into it without knowing what to expect. I'm excited for RISC-V hardware, but don't want to buy something for a specific application if it sucks at it.

[u/HardwareRaidIsDead]

I think they will be really good for Routers, Firewalls, IoTs, Home Assistant, Roku Replacement etc down the road, and i think this is the best place for non-X86 parts do to the ecosystem at the moment. also i don't know how good the Error correction is in them? I know newer X86 does lot's of Error correction, even the Cache in newer X86 parts has Error correction.