New RISC-V Raspberry Pi Alternative VisionFive V1 Coming Soon

A new single-board computer based on the RISC-V architecture has been revealed by StarFive, who previously announced, then cancelled the Beagle V in 2021. The $149 VisionFive V1 as reported by Liliputing looks set to be a rival for the Raspberry Pi .

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Measuring 3.9 x 2.8 inch the board is slightly larger than a Raspberry Pi 4 and features a 1.5 GHz dual-core SiFive U74 RISC-V processor. The RISC-V CPU is backed by 8GB of LPDDR4 and a micro SD card slot, plus HDMI 1.4, gigabit Ethernet, 3.5mm audio out, 4 x USB 3.0 type-A ports and a type-C for power. There's Wi-Fi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 onboard, and you get a 40-pin GPIO header which appears to be Raspberry Pi compatible, but the proof of this lies in software support. There are two MIPI connectors for use with compatible cameras and displays. 

The news follows the launch last week of the LycheeRV board from Sipeed, and the announcement from Canonical earlier this year that Ubuntu would support the open-source architecture. The VisionFive board will ship with support for a different flavor of Linux, Fedora (for which there's an image on GitHub) but we don’t know exactly when that will be yet. A set of slides for a talk due to be given at the RISC-V Summit on December 8 have leaked, and suggest a retail price of $149.

A second board, the VisionFive V2, is mentioned in the slide deck, and features a quad-core processor with GPU, plus support for HDMI 2.0 and PCIe 2.0 x2.