Competition for the Raspberry Pi: Orange Pi RV2
Different Fruit, Same Idea
© Photo by Madalina Batlan on Unsplash
The Orange Pi RV2, an affordable single-board computer, features the RISC-V architecture. We test how it compares to the Raspberry Pi.
Single-board computers (SBCs)continue to enjoy unbroken popularity – led by the Raspberry Pi, which has sold around 60 million units since its introduction in 2012 and spawned a host of competitor products. SBCs are predominantly based on ARM architectures as they promise a healthy mix of frugal power consumption, high integration, low costs, and modern CPU efficiency.
However, for several years, a different architecture has been coming to the fore, an architecture that mainly existed on paper for a long time and was rarely found in practice: RISC-V (think RISC Five) [1]. Originally launched as an academic project at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, RISC-V's purpose is to create a free and open instruction set architecture (ISA). Since there are no licensing costs and anyone can use, adapt, and develop the architecture, RISC-V is ideal for research and teaching.
RISC-V Slowly Catching Up
Right now, RISC-V is also becoming more relevant in commercial environments and the open source community, where people see the open ISA as an opportunity to outstrip proprietary architectures such as ARM. Mainboards for developers and enthusiasts have been seen, although they have tended to be in the high-end segment. But, if market forecasters are to be believed, the market share of RISC-V architectures is set to rise to around 25 percent by 2030. That is reason enough to take a closer look at the platform.
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