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This aerial view of a BeagleV system shows the processor (center), 4x USB 3.0 ports (far left), Gigabit Ethernet (top left), and 40-pin GPIO (bottom).
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Close-up view of the StarFive VIC7100 processor. Under the hood: two U74 RISC-V processor cores, a computer vision processor and a neural network engine.
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Schematic overview of the BeagleV system board.
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BeagleBoard is the oldest and best known of the partners behind BeagleV: a 501 (c) 3 non-profit, founded in 2008, which has produced over 10 inexpensive single board computers for hobbyists / developers.
Seeed Studios, the makers of the Odyssey mini PC we reviewed in August, have partnered with well-known SBC vendor BeagleBoard to produce an affordable RISC-V system designed to run Linux.
The new BeagleV (pronounced “Beagle Five”) system features a dual-core 1 GHz RISC-V processor manufactured by StarFive, one of the RISC-V startup networks created by better-known RISC-V vendor, SiFive. The processor is based on two of SiFive’s standard U74 cores – and unlike simpler microcontroller-only designs, it has an MMU and all the other tweaks needed to run full-fledged modern operating systems such as the Linux distributions.
StarFive’s VIC7100 processor design is intended for on-board AI tasks as well as general purpose computing. In addition to the two RISC-V processor cores, it has a Tensilica Vision VP6 DSP for machine vision applications, a neural network engine and a single-core NVDLA (Nvidia Deep Learning Accelerator) engine.
The BeagleV isn’t the first general-purpose RISC-V Linux PC to come out of SiFive’s designs, or even the second, but it’s considerably more cost effective than previous models such as the $ 680 HiFive Unmatched. The lower cost should make it a lot more appealing to hobbyists, as is the out-of-the-box support for Fedora Linux, with support for Debian Linux and the FreeRTOS microcontroller operating system coming soon after.
In addition to the StarFive processor, BeagleV includes 8 GiB of LPDDR4 RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, an 802.11n Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.2 chipset and a dedicated hardware video transcoder supporting H.264 and H.265 at 4K and 60fps. offers four USB 3.0 ports, a full-size HDMI output, a conventional 3.5mm audio jack, and a 40-pin GPIO connector. 5V / 3A power is supplied through a USB Type-C port and the system boots from a standard SD card.
We plan to have a review sample of the BeagleV in Ars at the end of March, with the community delivering the first run of the material in April. Widespread general availability will occur in September 2021. While the first hardware run is made entirely of $ 140 / 8GB systems, less expensive variants with less RAM are expected in subsequent releases.
The initial pilot run of BeagleV will use Vision DSP hardware as the graphics processor, enabling a full graphics desktop environment under Fedora. Subsequent hardware runs will also include an unspecified model of Imagine GPU.
Ars readers interested in purchasing one of the first “pilot” cards scheduled for delivery in April can register here to be part of the initial program.
Ad image by Seeed
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