Sipeed Unveils Four Carriers for Its RISC-V LM4A, Including a Cluster Box, a Tablet, and a Laptop PC

Embedded electronics specialist Sipeed has announced four new devices to host its RISC-V-powered Lichee Module 4A (LM4A), ranging from a multi-module cluster computer to a tablet with cameras and touchscreen display — with the first available now and the remainder launching throughout September and October.

"Sipeed Lichee series [is the] best Linux practical platform," the company crowed on social media this weekend just past as it unveiled its quartet of new carrier devices. "Lichee Pi 4A on sale, Lichee Cluster 4A on sale next week, Lichee Console 4A/Lichee Pad 4A will [be] on [the] store Sep/Oct, and start from $299!"

The Lichee Pi 4A, to start at the beginning, is a system-on-module (SOM) carrier board designed to turn it into a quasi-single-board computer (SBC), breaking out the most common features of the module for easy access. These include two gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 3.0 ports, one four-lane MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI), one two-lane and one four-lane MIPI Camera Serial Interface (CSI), HDMI with 4k60 support, and a 20-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, plus a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module for wireless connectivity.

The Lichee Cluster 4A, by contrast, is a bulkier affair, packing a custom motherboard in a mini-tower chassis with room for up to seven system-on-module boards — the first of which is given access to dedicated HDMI and gigabit Ethernet ports, with the remainder sharing USB 3.0 ports and a single Ethernet port. A management controller board, based on Sipeed's LicheeRV D1 module, gets its own Ethernet port for remote control, too.

The Lichee Pad 4A is, if the name wasn't enough of a clue, a tablet computer running a RISC-V port of Google's Android 13 operating system or Debian Linux. As well as a 10.1" 1920×1200 touchscreen display and 128GB of eMMC storage, the tablet includes five megapixel cameras front and rear, two USB 3.0 ports, microSD storage expansion, a Next-Generation Form Factor (NGFF) slot with SIM card support, dual microphones and speakers with 3.5mm headphone jack, and an 8Ah battery in an aluminum alloy case.

There's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity as standard, with the option to add a cellular module or an external interface card with dual gigabit Ethernet ports.

The Lichee Console 4A, to finish off, is a compact "netbook" style clamshell laptop built around a 7" 1280×800 touchscreen display. There's a 72-key keyboard with IBM ThinkPad-style pointing device, a two-megapixel front-facing camera, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity, a microSD slot, external M.2 SSD expansion capabilities, and an optional adapter for a single gigabit Ethernet port alongside integrated Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 radios.

The aluminum case hosts a 3Ah battery, with Sipeed not yet releasing runtime expectations for a device the company is positioning as a portable RISC-V development terminal.

All the devices announced by the company are designed to be powered by the Lichee Module 4A (LM4A) system-on-module, announced by Sipeed late last year. Built around the T-Head 1520 system-on-chip, the module offers four 64-bit XuanTie C910 RISC-V processor cores running at 2.5GHz, a fifth core acting as a digital signal processor (DSP), two gigabit PHYs, and a neural network accelerator offering a claimed four tera-operations per second (TOPS) of computer for on-device machine learning workloads, plus an Imagination Technologies graphics processor delivering a further 50 giga-floating point operations per second (GFLOPS).

At its unveiling, Sipeed promised a device which would outperform the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer and with up to twice the RAM at 16GB, to launch alongside 4GB and 8GB variants. This, the company is hoping, will be enough to tempt developers away from the Raspberry Pi platform and its proprietary Arm cores to the more open RISC-V ecosystem — and Sipeed's offerings in particular.

Sipeed has already listed the Lichee Pi 4A on its AliExpress store, starting at $119 with an LM4A module with 8GB of RAM and an 8GB eMMC and rising to $179 for a version with 16GB of RAM and 128GB eMMC. The Lichee Cluster 4A will launch next week, the company has promised, at an as-yet unknown price point, with the Lichee Console 4A and Lichee Pad 4A releasing in September and October starting from $299.

More information on all four devices is available on the Sipeed website.