StarFive Unveils VisionFive V1, Built on the Same RISC-V SoC as the Canceled $149 BeagleV Starlight

Due to launch at the same price point, the StarFive VisionFive V1 offers two RISC-V cores, 8GB of RAM, and a very familiar GPIO header.

StarFive has officially unveiled its first commercial in-house single-board computer built around the JH7100 RISC-V system-on-chip — and it's planning to fill the gap left by the BeagleBoard BeagleV Starlight's cancelation, right down to the $149 price point.

Beagleboard.org partnered with Seeed Studio and StarFive last year on what was initially announced as the BeagleV before being rebranded to the BeagleV Starlight. Based around a StarFive system-on-chip originally built for computer vision work, the board promised two 64-bit SiFive U74 RISC-V cores running at 1.5GHz, a Tensilica-VP6 vision processing unit (VPU), an NVIDIA Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA), and a neural network engine, plus 8GB of LPDDR4 memory — and all in an open-source design selling at just $149.

Sadly, while the BeagleV Starlight launched in beta form it never made the jump to a commercial product. BeagleBoard.org confirmed it was pulling the plug four months ago as it had failed to "reach its goals," while StarFive confirmed it would be working on successor boards based on the same JH7100 system-on-chip.

Now, the company has unveiled an in-house board design using the JH7100: The VisionFive V1. Its core specifications are the same as the BeagleV Starlight, being based on the same SoC, in a form factor which breaks out two MIPI CSI camera inputs, one MIPI DSI display output, a HDMI 1.4 port with 1080p60 support, four USB 3.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, and a gigabit Ethernet port, plus on-board 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 and a microSD slot for storage.

A big draw for the BeagleV Starlight was the bargain-basement $149 target price, offering impressive performance-per-dollar in comparison to other Linux-capable RISC-V boards on the market. From pre-release materials provided by StarFive, it seems that the same $149 price point will hold for its in-house design — and a higher-performance model based on a quad-core SoC with hardware 3D acceleration and PCI Express connectivity is already on the roadmap.

More information on the board can be found on the StarFive website.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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