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▲Orange Pi RV2 $40 RISC-V SBC: Friendly Gateway to IoT and AI Projectsriscv.org
36 points by warrenm 3 days ago | 27 comments
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swetland 34 minutes ago [-]
Don't suppose there's actually documentation for the CPU anywhere? (I mean more than a tiny "datasheet" with a very high level overview and/or a pile of random Linux/uboot patches)
rcarmo 1 hours ago [-]
I had a go at it a few months ago: https://taoofmac.com/space/reviews/2025/05/12/2230

Not bad at all, but the OpenWRT image still didn’t have Wi-Fi support a week or so ago, so I don’t know how good software support is going to be in the long run.

5d41402abc4b 2 hours ago [-]
Are there any SBC with memory slot so that i can plug in 32GiB or more of RAM?
chithanh 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, lots of Intel and AMD based SBCs have SO-DIMM slots, but you'll have to accept the 3.5" format.

Regarding RISC-V SBCs, there was serious consideration to release the Milk-V Oasis with SG2380 and LPCAMM2. But this didn't work out as the SG2380 was held up by geopolitical issues.

Havoc 12 minutes ago [-]
Orange pi 5 plus has 32gb versions. Pricey though
rcarmo 1 hours ago [-]
Not really. Most in the ARM space, at least, are soldered on or you need to switch out the entire compute module. Intel ones (not mini-PCs, but industrial gear and things like the LattePanda) also tend to have soldered RAM.
protocolture 2 hours ago [-]
I keep seeing suggestions that theres no software support for Orange Pi.

Whats the go there? Is there no distro like Raspbian supporting it?

chithanh 1 hours ago [-]
Xunlong (Orange Pi) operates similarly to Pine64, throw hardware at the community and then let the community figure out the software part.

They provide official OS images at release but don't care much afterwards.

OhMeadhbh 23 minutes ago [-]
There's a RV64 port of Debian and the RV2 and R2S are on the list of compatible hardware. No guarantee it'll be easy getting it loaded, it was like pulling teeth to get it on the SiFive U74 board, but that was 7 years ago, so it's GOT to be better by now.
rcarmo 1 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of Orange Pi boards with Armbian or unofficial Ubuntu support, but they’re ARM based.
jauntywundrkind 2 hours ago [-]
Absolutely smoked by rpi5, often by rpi4. To make matters worse, a radically unsupported core with no mainline support. https://www.phoronix.com/review/orange-pi-rv2-benchmarks/2
Havoc 11 minutes ago [-]
Don’t think people buy riscv for their performance competitiveness at this stage
sylware 31 minutes ago [-]
RISC-V going forward, one of the only beacons of hope in the silicon world.

I need one of such devices for my self-hosted services. And it will be time to port from C to assembly, really, because we have finally a CPU ISA which is 'sweet spot' balanced, standard, global, pushed forward with significant resources and without IP locks anywhere. No more developer/vendor lock-in via "the only compiler able to generate correct machine code", extremely hard to do planned obsolescence, etc, we need mainstream adoption NOW :)

The main blocker: how do I buy such device with a noscript/basic (x)html browser? And no way I use a credit card on a web site: would require well identified bank swift account, or wallet codes bought from local and physical currency terminals. I don't know of any local retailers I can buy such device from. Yep, the "web geniuses" at amazon (which supports wallet code) broke noscript/basic (x)html support a few years ago.

asadm 1 hours ago [-]
2 TOPS is not a lot for AI projects.
jdiaz97 54 minutes ago [-]
It's a lot for 40 USD. And not every AI project is a Language Model project.
OhMeadhbh 21 minutes ago [-]
meh. i write a lot of PROLOG, so 2 TOPS is A LOT of horsepower.
ekianjo 2 hours ago [-]
More info here from a few months back: https://boilingsteam.com/orange-pi-rv2-new-risc-v-board-revi...
kirito1337 3 days ago [-]
I don't like RISC-V unless it has a good GPU
warrenm 3 days ago [-]
GPUs are [effectively] irrelevant for many use cases (IoT, embedded, most servers, etc)
_zoltan_ 2 hours ago [-]
the title says "... AI projects". now, maybe our definitions are different, but you probably want some hardware acceleration.
jdiaz97 39 minutes ago [-]
The chip (KY X1) comes with AI acceleration...
snvzz 2 days ago [-]
Attach your favourite GPU at the PCIe slot.
webdevver 2 hours ago [-]
they all suck. someone needs to make an open source gpu already, its been way too long.
timschmidt 1 hours ago [-]
We did back in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graphics_Project

And there have been some others as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_...

Recently https://www.furygpu.com/

Part of the problem is that every ASIC manufacturer (and indeed each fabrication process) has a different toolchain with a different set of primitives for circuit design. Yosys and other open tooling for FPGAs has helped a great deal in lowering the barrier to chip design and by association reuse of circuits. But every ASIC, at the moment, is tied to some vendor's PDK. Here's the one Google open sourced for Cypress Semi's SKY130 process node: https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk

Findecanor 50 minutes ago [-]
It is at least theoretically possible to build a headless "GPU" from RISC-V processors that have the vector extension (RVV). RVV had been designed to be able to run programs compiled for the SIMT execution model that most GPUs use.

This Orange Pi RV2 has a small vector unit in each core, and could be used for at least prototyping the software until more powerful chips are available.

BTW. There have also been a couple hardware startups that have been working on commercial GPUs based on RISC-V's vector extension, with their own GPU-specific instruction set extensions for texture lookup and the like.

ekianjo 2 hours ago [-]
It's probably a series of patent landmines...
AnthonyMouse 1 hours ago [-]
Hardware patents are orthogonal to open source software. If a patent covers the hardware then someone who wants to manufacture the hardware needs to license the patent, but you were never going to get free-as-in-beer hardware anyway, and a hardware patent is independent of whether the hardware is fully documented or has firmware with published source code and a license that allows users to make changes to it.