by The ASUS Tinker V is the first single board computer with RISC-V chip from the Taiwanese manufacturer. It is another provider that bets on what happens to be the most promising Open Source processor in the industry.
The line Tinker Board is ASUS’ alternative to solutions like the Raspberry Pi. Present since 2017, all versions so far used an ARM architecture. The one in question breaks the trend, as it is the company’s first SBC with a 64-bit RISC-V processor.
It has been presented at the fair Embedded World which is being held this week in Germany and is mainly dedicated to platform entry and development tasks. The board isn’t particularly powerful in performance (it’s not necessary for this kind of task either) with a 1GHz single-core AX45MP processor crafted by Renesas RZ/Five.
ASUS Tinker V has 1 Gbyte of DDR4 memory, a microSD card slot for storage, and optional support for a 16 GB eMMC module and SPI flash. The number of ports is not bad as you will see:
- 2 GbE Ethernet
- 1 micro USB
- 1 micro USB (OTG)
- 2 CAN Bus (6-pin terminal block)
- 2 COM RS-232 (5-pin terminal block)
- 20-pin GPIO header
- JTAG debug pin header
- DC power input connector
We do not know date of availability or price, but it must be quite cheap. The board is officially compatible with Debian and Yocto Linux operating systems.
RISC-V
In case you are not familiar with this platform, say that It is a project emerged at the Californian University of Berkeley and its main objective is to develop what today is the open source processor most promising in the industry. It became popular when vulnerabilities in processors, Meltdown and Specter, showed that it was necessary “drive changes to the DNA of the core of the semiconductor industry and how processor architectures are designed”.
The RISC-V Foundation is in charge of developing a new open source chip design based on RISC architecture that offers a cheaper (and open) way of manufacturing semiconductors for current applications and all the new technologies that are coming for autonomous vehicles, Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality or data centers. The idea is that “Any processor foundry can manufacture based on them without the granting of intellectual property licences.”
The last few months we’ve seen quite a few RISC-V boards (StarFive VisionFive 2, Pine64 0x64, Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A, MangoPi MQ Pro, Allwinner Nezha…) and there are a few more announced for this year, including a Horse Creek from Intel which will also manufacture developments for this platform. As a case of use and its growing importance, note that a SiFive RISC-V will be the space flight computer main processor high-throughput spacecraft (HPSC) that NASA is developing for the arrival of humans on Mars.
