Pine64 starts selling Star64-sbc with RISC-V soc on April 4 for $70

Pine64 will start pre-sales of its Star64 single board computer on Tuesday, April 4. This SBC has a SoC with four U74 cores, which are based on RISC-V. The Star64 costs $70 for a model with 4GB of memory.

Pine64 already announced its Star64 SBC last year, but reports now that the single-board computer will go on sale on April 4. The SBC will then be available in variants with 4GB and 8GB Lpddr4 memory, for 70 and 90 dollars respectively. The Star64 can also be optionally equipped with up to 128GB of eMMC storage and also has a microSD card reader for booting an OS.

The board also has a RISC-V SoC with four U74 cores, which were designed by SiFive. This SoC also has a BXE-4-320 GPU from Imagination. On the sides there are four USB-A ports, two RJ45 connections for Gigabit Ethernet and an HDMI connector. The device also has a GPIO header, a PCIe x1 connection and support for WiFi and Bluetooth.

The Star64 is Pine64’s first RISC-V product. The company calls the SBC “a new RISC-V platform that will serve the Pine64 community for years to come.” RISC-V was originally developed by the Computer Science Division of the University of California. This instruction set architecture is open source, allowing chip designers to design chips based on this isa royalty-free. Other risky architectures, such as those from Arm, are only licensed for a fee.

Several companies are active around the RISC-V-isa. ASUS recently also announced a single-board computer with RISC-V SoC. At the beginning of this year, Google gave the Android platform support for RISC-V. Later this year, Intel and SiFive will release a single-board computer based on a RISC-V SoC. Intel previously invested a billion dollars in RISC-V and was rumored to be planning to acquire SiFive, but that ultimately fell through. The European Processor Initiative is working on European-designed accelerators for supercomputers, partly based on RISC-V.