ESWIN Computing Partners with Canonical to Put Ubuntu on Its New EBC77 Series RISC-V SBCs

ESWIN Computing has announced its own Raspberry Pi-inspired single-board computer (SBC) family, the EBC77 Series, built around its four-core EIC7700X RISC-V system-on-chip — and it's partnered with Canonical to provide official support in Ubuntu 24.04, though questions remain about future releases.

"ESWIN Computing's launch of the EBC77 Series SBC integrates our strengths in high-end product design and computing power optimization with Canonical's expertise in the Ubuntu OS and cloud-native technologies, jointly delivering more stable, flexible, and high-performance hardware-software solutions for diverse scenarios," says ESWIN's Haibo Lu of the partnership. "We look forward to collaborating with Canonical to explore technological innovations, create greater value for industry partners and developer communities, and step into the new era of intelligent computing together!"

"The launch of ESWIN Computing's EBC77 Series SBC represents a significant advancement for the open-source community, empowering everyone from seasoned developers to newcomers to innovate on the RISC-V architecture," adds Canonical's Jonathan Mok. "This highlights both the adaptability and robustness of Ubuntu, and underscores Canonical's deep commitment to providing the best software environment for developers in the RISC-V ecosystem. Our collaboration with ESWIN Computing is an example of how we can make open standards and shared innovation truly thrive."

The ESWIN EBC77 Series makes no attempt to hide its inspiration, boasting a very familiar layout based on the full-size Raspberry Pi family of Arm-based single-board computers. At its heart, though, is ESWIN's own EIC7700X system-on-chip — delivering four 64-bit RISC-V cores running at up to 1.8GHz, an in-house neural coprocessor with a claimed minimum-precision compute performance of 20 tera-operations per second (TOPS), with a 64-bit LPDDR5 memory controller.

The exact amount of memory available to the user will depend on which model in the family they purchase, but all include a range of shared peripherals: a four-lane PCI Express Gen. 3 connection for high-speed external devices including Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) storage and machine learning accelerators, two USB 3.2 Gen. 1 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a gigabit Ethernet connection plus a dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi module, micro-HDMI and a four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) video outputs, a dedicated four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI) input plus the ability to repurpose the DSI output as a CSI input, a microSD Card slot for storage, and a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header carrying signals including I2S, I2C, and UART buses.

Canonical has confirmed that the board will be an official target for Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support (LTS), gaining an official image of the operating system — but it seems unlikely that said support will continue through into future releases: the company has previously shifted its focus towards RISC-V devices built to the RVA23 baseline profile and higher, whereas ESWIN's new board is based on the older RVA20 profile. As a result, Ubuntu 24.04 could well be both the first and the last version to be compatible with the new board — a confusing position in which to put its new partner.

ESWIN has listed the EBC77 on its Amazon store with prices starting at $149 including bundled heatsink and cables — but has yet to confirm how much RAM is available on that model.